Love fishing in video games? Love Animal Crossing? This is for you!
I really enjoyed this game. I was really on the fence based on the reviews on Steam, due to glitches and mechanics of the game, which is fine if they were old reviews, but these were recent. I didn't experience anything that people were complaining about. The worst glitch I saw was a flying raccoon, which I thought was a bonus...
I definitely recommend a controller, it's difficult to use a keyboard with this game, especially for the cooking mini-game, but I thought the controls/handling was just fine beyond that.
Overall, I think this was a great game, I could easily see myself replaying this game in a year or two, it's very relaxing like a Story of Seasons/Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing game.
I really enjoyed this game. I was really on the fence based on the reviews on Steam, due to glitches and mechanics of the game, which is fine if they were old reviews, but these were recent. I didn't experience anything that people were complaining about. The worst glitch I saw was a flying raccoon, which I thought was a bonus...
I definitely recommend a controller, it's difficult to use a keyboard with this game, especially for the cooking mini-game, but I thought the controls/handling was just fine beyond that.
Overall, I think this was a great game, I could easily see myself replaying this game in a year or two, it's very relaxing like a Story of Seasons/Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing game.
A fun little Stardew-like that massively, massively overstayed its welcome and that is sadly plagued by really strange quest design. Game seems to want you to enjoy it openly as well as give you a very strictly guided experience.
The fishing part of the game is pretty chill, and the cooking part made me eventually quit the game.
Enjoyed it for a decent bit, then played it to try to finish it, and eventually just gave up.
The fishing part of the game is pretty chill, and the cooking part made me eventually quit the game.
Enjoyed it for a decent bit, then played it to try to finish it, and eventually just gave up.
É um jogo até legal e relaxante, mas acabou sendo esmagado pelos outros jogos, que eu joguei ao mesmo tempo.
Ele tem a opção de pronome neutro na tradução, as vezes esse sisteminha buga e os personagens começam a se referir a você de forma errada. Isso não atrapalha o gameplau, mas fica estranho.
O que atrapalha mesmo são os controles no teclado e mouse, não custava nada terem deixado um bom layout já de padrão. Por mais que você arrume nas configurações, é bem chatinho arrumar, já que algumas teclas conflitam com outras.
Agora as mecânicas são bacanas, da pra dirigir o barco, pescar de diferentes formas, cozinhar e expandir seu negócio. Se você está sem ideia pra um calmante em forma de jogo, essa é uma opção que pode ser legal, se você fizer um esforço no começo.
Ele tem a opção de pronome neutro na tradução, as vezes esse sisteminha buga e os personagens começam a se referir a você de forma errada. Isso não atrapalha o gameplau, mas fica estranho.
O que atrapalha mesmo são os controles no teclado e mouse, não custava nada terem deixado um bom layout já de padrão. Por mais que você arrume nas configurações, é bem chatinho arrumar, já que algumas teclas conflitam com outras.
Agora as mecânicas são bacanas, da pra dirigir o barco, pescar de diferentes formas, cozinhar e expandir seu negócio. Se você está sem ideia pra um calmante em forma de jogo, essa é uma opção que pode ser legal, se você fizer um esforço no começo.
This was without a doubt one of the most charming games I played in 2022. Only thing I didn’t like was the grinding at the very end of the game. If there was slightly more content from an upgrading the town perspective and a better ending I’d rate it 5/5. While it has some technical performance issues I think it’s more fun then Animal Crossing or Cozy Grove.
this is a good game to be chill
This review contains spoilers
I hate having to put so many asterisks on games I love. It sucks, but here goes.
Moonglow Bay is waking up on a Sunday morning, knowing that you have no real plans for the day and just relaxing. There's not a lot of challenge, no hard commitments - Moonglow Bay is a game about vibing. There's a lot of repetition involved, but that's fine. It's not like you've been adding new songs to your playlists recently, right? Wait, are you listening to Metallica's Master of Puppets again? What's that, the third time in two weeks?
The story is very pleasant, grief is a common thread throughout, as is the building sense of community within the town. I am a sucker for found family plots, it's why Cars is one of my favourite Pixar movies. There's also some fairly ambitious set-pieces at the end of each chapter, which, for the most part, stick the landing despite their issues. This is all accompanied by a phenomenal soundtrack by Lena Raine, where day-to-day background music is constant without ever being grating, and the set-piece music is emotional, swelling and always fits the mood.
However, to say this game has issues would be like saying this game has fish (to clarify, there are 151 types of fish). One of the aforementioned ambitious set-pieces is terribly tedious and difficult, and I've read multiple stories of people quitting despite otherwise enjoying the game. Then there's the sometimes game-breaking bugs, unintentional sequence breaks, confusing quest steps and misplaced quest markers. Once, I sequence broke in a way I couldn't recover from, and I had to glitch my game to get back on track. Other players edited their save file or are waiting for a patch, with developers confirming that they know about the bug but are yet to fix it. The game came out 8 months ago.
Other than that, I only really have one critique. I think there's a certain disharmony between the game's plotlines. Your character works hard, spending time and a phenomenal amount of money to fix up the town. I found this pretty rewarding, particularly at a plot point where the rest of the town catch onto your character's attitude and begin to help out. But once this cutscene is over, it's back to business as usual and the rest of the game is unaffected. These people keep wanting to buy your seafood, but none of them lift a finger when the opportunity to spend money fixing the town comes around. I found the rest of the plot and writing to be emotionally resonant, so it's a massive shame that this muted my reaction to how the plot turned out in that regard.
Oh yeah, did I say I loved this game? If you love it enough to Google the answers and workarounds every time you get stuck, you'll hopefully enjoy it as much as I did. If that sounds like a bridge you'd rather not cross, then it's not for you.
Moonglow Bay is waking up on a Sunday morning, knowing that you have no real plans for the day and just relaxing. There's not a lot of challenge, no hard commitments - Moonglow Bay is a game about vibing. There's a lot of repetition involved, but that's fine. It's not like you've been adding new songs to your playlists recently, right? Wait, are you listening to Metallica's Master of Puppets again? What's that, the third time in two weeks?
The story is very pleasant, grief is a common thread throughout, as is the building sense of community within the town. I am a sucker for found family plots, it's why Cars is one of my favourite Pixar movies. There's also some fairly ambitious set-pieces at the end of each chapter, which, for the most part, stick the landing despite their issues. This is all accompanied by a phenomenal soundtrack by Lena Raine, where day-to-day background music is constant without ever being grating, and the set-piece music is emotional, swelling and always fits the mood.
However, to say this game has issues would be like saying this game has fish (to clarify, there are 151 types of fish). One of the aforementioned ambitious set-pieces is terribly tedious and difficult, and I've read multiple stories of people quitting despite otherwise enjoying the game. Then there's the sometimes game-breaking bugs, unintentional sequence breaks, confusing quest steps and misplaced quest markers. Once, I sequence broke in a way I couldn't recover from, and I had to glitch my game to get back on track. Other players edited their save file or are waiting for a patch, with developers confirming that they know about the bug but are yet to fix it. The game came out 8 months ago.
Other than that, I only really have one critique. I think there's a certain disharmony between the game's plotlines. Your character works hard, spending time and a phenomenal amount of money to fix up the town. I found this pretty rewarding, particularly at a plot point where the rest of the town catch onto your character's attitude and begin to help out. But once this cutscene is over, it's back to business as usual and the rest of the game is unaffected. These people keep wanting to buy your seafood, but none of them lift a finger when the opportunity to spend money fixing the town comes around. I found the rest of the plot and writing to be emotionally resonant, so it's a massive shame that this muted my reaction to how the plot turned out in that regard.
Oh yeah, did I say I loved this game? If you love it enough to Google the answers and workarounds every time you get stuck, you'll hopefully enjoy it as much as I did. If that sounds like a bridge you'd rather not cross, then it's not for you.
The idea is fun, but unfortunately this one's held back by linearity and some surprisingly poor performance for such a simple-styled game.
Man I Love Fishin'
I'm ambivalent about this one. I loved the vibe and exploring, the cooking minigames were neat and I did enjoy the fishing and writing, but by ~6 hours in I'd gotten to grips with it all and it started getting a bit repetitive. The final straw was when I hit a bug (stuck in the shop UI) that meant I'd lose like an hour of gameplay and I just gave up and watched the rest on a Let's Play. Also, shout out for including pronoun selection for you and your partner (even if some NPC dialogue doesn't seem to account for it)
Haven’t actually played it but it asks for your pronouns and that’s fuckin dope
Has multiple parts in the map where you can get trapped or stuck in the scenery since there's no jump button and softlock the game. And there's no autosaving either. Good concept, but wait until they fix this bug.
There are some mechanics/quests that I found frustrating and that had me at a loss. The story is cute, I like the aesthetics, the fishing is cool. Good vibes, but not sure if it's enough for me to come back to finish the game.
played using my partner's xbox game pass
played using my partner's xbox game pass
great co-op experience, does coop really well, focuses on the two things it wants but needs a little bit of polish
A very nice looking and feeling game, with some grind near the end. Love the messages it tells and most of the quality of life decisions made. Just a little slow for me near the end, but otherwise really free in how you can approach things!
Generally charming and pleasant, with a few unfortunate design choices that drag it down. Lena Raine’s soundtrack is great, and the 2D illustrations of fish and food and people are cute and imaginative and expressive, but then the voxel graphics don’t really work for anything except the buildings because they strip everything else of emotion and character. The fishing and cooking loops feel tactile and engaging enough in small doses, but progression through things like recipes requires grindy repetition (e.g. making 3 batches of 1 item each gives more progress towards new recipes than 2 batches of 20 items?) and quality of life shortcuts are held back for way too long.
;w; This game is so cute and so soft and so gay and every second I spent playing it gave me serotonin I was desperately in need of. An honest 10/10 for me.
At the beginning you pick from 4 character portraits (2 more femme-presenting, 2 more masc-presenting) and regardless of which you pick you can choose he, she, or they pronouns for both you and your spouse. Also both characters are elderly and have an adult daughter, so depending on how you play elder gay rep!! Aaaah!!
Also also the game takes place in Canada, and the more masc-leaning character designs are brown skinned and at least the long haired one reads as very indigenous-coded which also makes me super happy!
The game is about learning to deal with grief in a healthy way, and involves fishing and cooking and working with your community to better your town. There's also a strong theme of how unfounded superstition, "magical thinking", and unchallenged ignorance can destroy lives and communities, and how to combat that.
All-in-all a spectacular game, please do yourself a favor and play it.
At the beginning you pick from 4 character portraits (2 more femme-presenting, 2 more masc-presenting) and regardless of which you pick you can choose he, she, or they pronouns for both you and your spouse. Also both characters are elderly and have an adult daughter, so depending on how you play elder gay rep!! Aaaah!!
Also also the game takes place in Canada, and the more masc-leaning character designs are brown skinned and at least the long haired one reads as very indigenous-coded which also makes me super happy!
The game is about learning to deal with grief in a healthy way, and involves fishing and cooking and working with your community to better your town. There's also a strong theme of how unfounded superstition, "magical thinking", and unchallenged ignorance can destroy lives and communities, and how to combat that.
All-in-all a spectacular game, please do yourself a favor and play it.
It's hard for me to recommend Moonglow to anyone, not because it's a bad game but because its issues, bugs and glitches can often be extremely frustrating and stressful in a game about lazily fishing.
What a charming and relaxing game that will (hopefully) only increase in quality as it gets more time with the QA team.
What a charming and relaxing game that will (hopefully) only increase in quality as it gets more time with the QA team.
had fun fishing, especially in local co-op when we busted out the sea shanties playlist.
the controls are kind of weird, though, with 'confirm' being different buttons in different menus and stuff like that which meant you never really got used to it or got into a flow.
the quest progression was also confusing. there'd been a spot on my map marked as a quest for several in-game days that i could not get into the building for, only to look it up and find that that quest couldnt be accessed yet. sooooo why did it have a marker..?
what story i played was alright and the 2d art style was super charming even if i didnt like the 3d/overworld style much.
the controls are kind of weird, though, with 'confirm' being different buttons in different menus and stuff like that which meant you never really got used to it or got into a flow.
the quest progression was also confusing. there'd been a spot on my map marked as a quest for several in-game days that i could not get into the building for, only to look it up and find that that quest couldnt be accessed yet. sooooo why did it have a marker..?
what story i played was alright and the 2d art style was super charming even if i didnt like the 3d/overworld style much.
Ooof. I really wanted to like this game. I love cozy games, I love fishing, and I was excited to be playing an older character who was already married. But whatever positives this game has are vastly outweighed by how much the game wastes your time. Of particular note re: time wasting is the cooking minigame, which takes several minutes to cook a single dish... and if you want to master the recipe, you need to cook every dish nine times (and that's only if you get it perfect every time-- even a minor slip on the hardest minigame needs you to reload your save if you want to maximize your efficiency). Moreover the writing falls short of great; the setting is depressing but characters talk exclusively in quirky quips. It feels like the game is afraid to be sincere.
Absolutely cannot recommend this game. 4/10 and most of those points are me seeing potential and wanting it to be better.
Absolutely cannot recommend this game. 4/10 and most of those points are me seeing potential and wanting it to be better.
Right now I dont think they should have bothered releasing a standard Xbox One version if its going to be this slow, laggy and poorly optimised. Hopefully i'll be able to try this again at a later time as it looks quite relaxing but otherwise its a sad skip and non-ranking for me.
no me estaba gustando mucho y aún así me he viciado como si no hubiera un mañana así que algo habrá hecho bien supongo