In Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, the doors swing open to an Early Access adventure where shopkeeping ambition collides with dungeon-crawling danger. This preview invites players to step into Tresna, a village brimming with castaways and opportunity, while testing their mettle against the mysterious Vault. Every relic hauled back fuels your shop, every sale strengthens your community, and every choice balances greed against survival. It’s a living, evolving journey where feedback shapes the future, and the thrill of discovery is only just beginning.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault Preview Pros

• Beautiful graphics. 
• 4.56GB Download size. 
• Steam achievements. 
• Full controller support, and you can remap the controls. 
• Screen settings – resolution, display mode, v-sync, and FPS limit. 
• Graphics settings – graphics preset, texture detail, shadow distance, shadow detail, shader quality, anti-aliasing, and upscaling quality. 
• Mouse and keyboard support, to which you can remap the controls. 
• Gameplay settings – language, redirect attack with mouse, vibration, difficulty, and screenshake slider. 
• Three game difficulties – Easy, Normal and Hard. 
• Volume slider for – sounds, music, and the master volume slider. 
• Four save slots. 
• Excellent art book, like cutscenes, with a great narrator over the top. (You can skip them if you don’t enjoy fun or are in a rush) 
• Beautiful 3D landscapes and dungeons to explore, it’s all capped off with an isometric camera angle, so you see everything. 
• Adventure RPG gameplay. 
• An opening tutorial area with signs, then you get pop-ups and a help menu, along with button prompts on screen. 
• You play as Will and are running a shop for Ms Scratch and meeting with the many colourful characters of the world. 
• Attack-wise wise as standard, you have a melee weapon, a roll and a ranged slime gun that you reload with ammo by hitting enemies and breaking pots and boxes, etc, with your melee weapon. 
• A very charming and inviting game, it almost instantly grabs you and transports you to this fascinating world. 
• Relics are the bread and butter of your shop, and they come in different rarity levels that affect how much you can sell them for. 
• Cursed relics are a thin,g and placing them in a good place in your rucksack or shop will see their outcomes and quality change depending on your placement. 
• You see enemies going around, and they always have health bars above their heads. 
• Rupture is a state you get an enemy in after a few attacks, and it’s obvious when this happens (a glow), and hit them with your backpack to send them flying! OH, quick note, you can kill enemies by knocking them off the scenery and knocking them into other enemies to do damage. 
• Yes, you can pause the game, don’t worry! 
• Full stats screen, including in-game timer. 
• The pendant you carry allows you to fast travel out of a dungeon or place and back home, and from what I saw, it doesn’t have any downside; you keep all collected relics. 
• Your Codex menu will show previous tutorials and relics, along with details. Coming soon will be entries for enemies, characters, perks, and housewares. 
• A mini map that shows mission markers is on the screen at all times. 
• The Endless Vault is a cube-like being that appears and can talk to you regardless of where you are. They promise you riches and desires met if you help them with challenges and missions. 
• Customers looking at items in your shop will give emoji reactions to help you of the price is too low, good, high, or way too high. 
• Worth noting that you can change prices at anytime, even when a customer is at the item. 
• Tresna is the town you call home, and when there, you manage your shop, talk with the locals, visit other shops and amenities like the blacksmith. When you are here, you cannot use weapons, and places and routes will be blocked off until you progress further. 
• The quality of an item will increase the price as you change the price yourself. 
• Luckily, the Relic Codex will keep track of the prices you give items, and you can access it when you are putting a price on an item. 
• In-game cutscenes and character interactions that you can skip and click through. 
• Aswel as dungeon crawling, you are also a shop owner and you sell the wares and items you find when in the dungeons. 
• You can choose when to open your shop, and once all your items are sold, the shop shuts automatically. 
• The game breaks you in slowly by breaking all the elements and mechanics of the game down into sections, and you have a dry run on them all. 
• Four melee weapon types – Gauntlets (dual blade-like), spears, a large sword, and a sword. Every weapon has its own special attack, and you get a pop up showing what it is and how to do it and see it in action. 
• The blacksmith in town can upgrade and craft your weapons and armour if you bring coins and materials. 
• The Arcanism shop lets you use coins and materials to permanently upgrade your character and add buffs and perks to future dungeon runs. 
• Tight responsive controls, the game moves fast, and it’s so easy to play. 
• The portal in town takes you to your locations and challenges. By the portal are weapons you have unlocked, so you can quickly pick them up and select one. 
• Relics have their own effects, like they can burn, destroy, freeze, and straight up ruin your backpack and items if you don’t pay attention. 
• Dungeons are a choose-your-own-path affair; you choose each route and stop on a randomised Web of activities. 
• As you go through the dungeon rooms, you get to pick one of three random upgrades for the rest of the run. 
• Materials can drop from enemies, breakable chests, etc, and when you first collect them, you get a pop-up description. 
• Deadly traps and fauna are all around; it also attacks and kills enemies, so bear that in mind. 
• The game is just a bigger, more smoothed-out experience for me over the previous game. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s quicker to action. 
• There are mini and full-blown boss encounters. 
• You can heal with a potion, and it’s instant, no casting time or anything. 
• A very deep strategy layer from backpack management to knowing what to keep or not, and then you have all the shop management placement. 
• When you die in a dungeon, you can keep your relics and they lose 50 per cent of their value, or you continue and lose all relics on you at the time. 
• An end-of-run or end-of-life breakdown shows with relics and items collected, their amount, and a progress bar as to how far you got. 
• The game is split up into days, and at the end of the day, you get a breakdown of what you did and solved, and it updates any challenge progression. 
• This time round, I found everything was so slimline it made the game a lot more engaging, and I didn’t dread anything or find it as a drag to do. 
• K33P3R is your robot assistant that will store items you don’t want to or can’t sell atm. He can also upgrade your shop and add more display cases, decorate, etc, and he can let you rearrange your Store and make it yours. 
• Find and earn new crafting recipes. 
• Shop perks is where you fill perk bars from selling to customers, and once done, you get a perk to increase the gold you earn for the rest of your shift. 
• The shop does get a bit plate spinny, as items sell quickly, place more to keep the money and customers coming, but then you also need to man the till to take money. It gets better, but early on it’s crazy. 
• They have made the selling a little quicker with the Codex of prices and quick move buttons. 
• The shooting of your weapon is the traditional twin stick hooter controls, and you can see the aiming line. 
• Merchant progression is another skill tree where you can unlock new perks and buffs, but these all pertain to the shop itself and the act of selling. 
• You can track and untrack missions and tasks. There are main story beats and many optional side missions. 
• There is a lot of variety to not just levels but also how you play and what you choose to do and when. 
• A lot of content for an early access game, but you can also see the breadcrumbs of what is coming, and it’s genuinely exciting. 
• Over time, you will unlock new armour, trinkets, etc, and you can change your load out. 
• Many elements and more are in the game, like foam, freezing, fire, acid, etc. 
• A Game has finally made breaking useless objects in-game meaningful! (It reloads your ranged weapon). 
• All perks on a run use rarity like legendary, etc, which can increase how good they are. 
• I found the gameplay loop to just be so engrossing, the satisfaction of a good dungeon run and then watching all the money go up in the shop. 

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault Preview Cons

• No accessibility options like Colourblind or text size, and the text in particular is a bit on the small side. 
• The performance can be a bit jumpy and all over the place, with slowdown or juddering a common experience. 
• Once in-game, the majority of the characters you meet are text-based with no voice work. 
• No auto scroll with conversations. 
• Returning players of the first game will not always be happy about being told how to play the game again. 
• Until you learn what all the icons mean on the map, you will have a rough time or a good time. 
• It is still possible and frustrating to fall off the side of the screen or off a platform. 
• Enemy attacks can sometimes be hard to see, and the red marks and lines don’t always help. 
• On the map of the dungeon, you have to press and hold the button every time to advance. 
• The combat is mash,y, and if you are not a fan of these techniques, it can be stressful. 
• Early on, it’s slow, but once you finally pick up pace, it goes some and then more, but it’s a bit of a long on-ramp. 
• There is a lot of stuff around locations like rocks and sticks, pots, etc, that can easily and often get in your way or get you stuck. 

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Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault

Official Website: 

Developer: Digital Sun

Publisher: 11 bit studios

Store Link:

Steam Early Access