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.