Last May brought us a fabulously crafted roguelike from Digital Sun that they have continued to pour much love and work into. Though Moonlighter wasn’t without its faults, the continued free updates (largely fueled by the team’s very successful Kickstarter campaign) proved the developers want to make it the best experience it could be. Since I reviewed it last year, quality of life improvements and bug fixes have addressed most of the issues but have left players like myself wanting more beyond the New Game+ offered. With the release of Between Dimensions, the first paid DLC, there’s a whole new Dungeon full of surprises to be explored.
Picking up three months after the story events in the base game, Will wakes up in his shop as usual, ready to face a day of business or dungeoneering. This time, however, a mysterious new portal has opened, jeopardizing the entire arrangement made between Ryonka and the ICT. Now Will, hero of Ryonka, has to make his way into the green, gooey realm and discern its origins. The premise is a simple hook that, like the base game, offers some surprisingly rich storytelling, as you once again encounter camps on each floor telling the tale of an abandoned scavenger through their journal logs. Unfortunately, the writing once again shows its non-English roots as grammatical errors and missed punctuation can disrupt the flow during the cutscenes. Despite this, I was legitimately impressed with what was unveiled with the final encounter.
While the base gameplay remains the same, the formula of the Wanderer Dungeon takes players on a different journey. We aren’t just getting another three floors leading to a final boss; this time 10 floors make up a sort of gauntlet dungeon with checkpoints at each exit beyond the second floor. Portals that lead back to town are offered in each exit chamber as well, which is important, since the ability to generate your own with the Merchant’s Amulet is disabled in this Dungeon. Wagering whether to press on further or not is now imperative since a boss encounter awaits you at each even floor’s end. These bosses definitely gave me more of what I wanted: fights that really test player skill. Further, the bosses change at random, making for more variety with each of these major encounters. Should you defeat these foes, you’ll get a slime chest offering rare accessories or the new blueprints exclusive to the Wanderer Dungeon. If players exit, they will find that facing a boss every second floor can become tedious, despite how interesting the battles may be. Thankfully, Digital Sun lets you bypass these for a cost.
Slime Chunks, this new dungeon’s currency, are introduced in this DLC and are earned from felling foes as you explore between dimensions. There is also the Slime Merchant, who takes your hard-earned chunks and gold at the end of each floor. Every floor the merchant appears to sell potions, while on every second floor it also sells a shortcut portal and weapons (if you have the blueprints). The shortcuts are a great milestone and make the entire gauntlet more accessible. As you go deeper, the price gets steeper, but it’s better than starting at the top again.
As for the blueprints, these yield items that can only be wielded in the Wanderer Dungeon and will leave your inventory if you exit. Thankfully, if you brought the blueprint to the Slime Merchant and purchased it, the weapons can be acquired in any future run. Not only are these implements more powerful than any of the starting gear in this dungeon, they also come with a neat new feature. The slime weapon’s secondary function can be activated to “transform” and add a special ability to these items at the cost of health with use. It’s a steep risk/reward system but is often worth it to be able to fill the room with poison gas clouds or pilfer items from enemies with each hit. Eventually, the base power of these non-upgradeable items does get outpaced by the gear crafted from Wanderer Culture items, but their secondary functions cannot be imitated, ensuring their value throughout the DLC.
The Wander Dungeon also seems to be a sort of intersection for all the Dungeons, so you’ll see a few familiar foes. However, new enemies have been introduced to the mix (that really chafed me), as many of them have the ability to steal items from you. This keeps you on your toes, as before you only lost items if you fainted in the Dungeons. Some enemies return the items upon death, but others keep what they take, which gets nasty if they pilfer your expensive loot or potions! Other new foes can pass through the slime-covered walls in the Wanderer Dungeon’s deeper levels, and all of them hit hard until you craft the latest gear. The challenge is real in this expansion and it will test your limits with each delve.
Over the past three months, Ryonka has undergone a bit of a change in how it looks, and it offers a few new options to players as well. One of the new changes is the ICT Trader, a surly anthropomorphic rat that players need to trade Dungeon items with to obtain rare crafting materials. Occasionally, patrons will come into the Moonlighter and offer one of these rare items for trade, but the Trader is the best place to come by what you need more often. These items are key for the added upgrade trees for each piece of equipment. While the upgrades are powerful and necessary to defeat the Wanderer Dungeon, it is a touch underwhelming having only one tree per piece given the variety offered in the base game. Otherwise, the DLC offers one more expansion to the Moonlighter store (comes with a Roomba!) and some more decorations. I was expecting a bit more of a shift from the base game, given the relationship established with the ICT at Moonlighter’s end, though the justification of this newfound portal putting things on hold is enough for me to accept the lack of growth.
Within a week of the DLC’s release, Digital Sun kept up their good faith, patching some of the bugs at launch and adding new content as well. One example of this really shakes up a day of running the store, as a bird bursts into the shop, putting everything on hold until Will manages to capture the silly thing. These little delays are enough to slow down your day of earning or even dissuade guests from staying in the shop altogether. They also introduced more pets (free content in the base game) to cart along with you into the Dungeons, offering a little extra help.
Rounding out the experience is new music filling the various floors of the Wanderer Dungeon, which changes every few floors the deeper you journey. The new tracks are full of mystery befitting the visually striking and unique halls the portal has pulled Will into. The new animations with the enemies are as impressive as anything art director David Aguado and the team gave us before, and the new bosses even moreso. The final fight offers some unique and outstanding visuals to accompany the conclusion of this DLC.
It’s unfortunate that the Between Dimensions DLC launched a bit rough around the edges, as players reported myriad bugs affecting their playthroughs. For myself, there’s one specific room type that is broken and puts a stop to my runs, forcing me to pay my Merchant’s Amulet to exit the Dungeon and waste my time and money. Another bug that made me nervous was that the final cutscene wouldn’t load after I beat the final boss. After my last experience with a buggy game, I thought this was it, but everything worked out after I felled the big bad a second time. As I mentioned above, however, Digital Sun is doing their best to rectify these issues — their website details their consistent efforts to fix things almost daily since the DLC released.
By journey’s end, I found myself pleased with the experience Between Dimensions offers fans of Moonlighter. It is more of the same, so if the roguelike shopkeeping adventure offered in the base game wasn’t for you, this DLC won’t change your mind. But for those that wanted more in the Moonlighter world to explore, fight, and sell, then you will get a lot out of this hefty expansion, especially for its low price point. Bugs aside, Digital Sun has clearly put a lot of love into crafting this new Dungeon and everything that comes with it, visually and mechanically. Ryonka’s popularity is on the rise once more and you and Will can be at the forefront in this exciting piece of DLC.
