Overthinking Games runs every other Monday, and is an opportunity for Malindy Hetfeld to take something about a game and think about it too much. This week she looks at how Moonlighter makes the inventory really count.
Games have, by and large made us into an insatiable, entitled bunch. We ve come to expect to be able to waltz into someone s home and take the bread right off their plate, chests in the woods were left just for us, and all wolves take their purses when they leave their den. There s a lot of stuff in games, and always more of it than we need, especially if we start hoarding it just in case . Even though game worlds have grown, it doesn t seem to occur to us that this also means a steep rise in resources, and so we still treat a lot of our finds as priceless.
This is exactly the kind of feeling Moonlighter tries to counter. A procedurally generated dungeon means a plethora of a) monsters and b) stuff said monsters could carry, as well as c) random loot throughout. To stop you feeling as if you re just collecting stuff for the sake of collecting it, the key aspect of Moonlighter is your shop. It s where the name comes from — you re a shopkeeper moonlighting as an adventurer (or possibly an adventurer moonlighting as a shopkeeper).