Moonglow Bay Review

Synopsis:
In Moonglow Bay, you play as a rookie angler, working together with friends, family, and neighbours to hone your fishing skills, nourish relationships, and restore a remote town’s fractured community.

Publisher: Coatsink
Reviewed on: PC (Ryzen 5 2600, RTX 2070 Super, 32GB DDR4)
Also available for: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Developer: Bunnyhug
Creative Director: Zach Soares
Art Director: Lu Nascimento
Game Designer: Zach Soares, Albertine Watson
Composer: Lena Raine

Moonglow Bay is a cute and wholesome fishing RPG that’s bound to please those looking to get a Stardew Valley kick without as many of the mechanics. Which I was, and the game gave me by allowing me to complete a narrative in just under twenty hours and tick some of my farmers market needs by selling and cooking fish.

Similar games in the genre don’t focus on telling much of a story, but Moonglow Bay does, and it’s all the better for it. Although you can name your character, pick pronouns and choose for a couple of body types, you won’t have any conversion choices or input into how the story plays out. Moonglow Bay is a focused narrative on an older person coming to terms with losing a loved one and helping rebuild a town.

In the game’s opening minutes, you learn how to fish and discover your partner has disappeared on a fishing trip some years prior. I named my character Dylan, and it was apparent they’d been living in a depression hole, that is, until their daughter comes to visit and encourages them to start fishing again, not only for themselves but also for the town. You see, Moonglow Bay has sunken into a bit of a mess. There’s trash on the beaches, run-down buildings, and no longer any visitors outside those who live on the island. A fear of otherworldly fish has scared everyone out of business, and the town is floating along like one of the plastic bags on the ocean, barely above the surface.

Learning to fish is step one, and you’ll spend a lot of the time playing Moonglow Bay doing. It seems more complicated at first as you have to pull the rod in the opposite direction that the fish try to head in, but as soon as you unlock the agile rod, you can very quickly pull a fish in within a second as long as you don’t mess it up. This is good as the monotony of the task will soon draw in; a more frustrating fishing system would have driven me insane. That said, it makes the first hour of the game and learning the different rod types nearly unnecessary.

Where the complicated mini-games are and do deserve to be, is in the kitchen. As you pull in more fish either from the beach or eventually on your boat, you’ll unlock receipts you can cook. Dylan can sell these meals for currency which you’ll need to buy upgrades to your boat, fishing accessories and restore Moonglow Bay to its full potential.

The cooking mini-games never hit their element as there’s not enough variety in them. Even when you unlock the advanced recipes, you’re simply doing more intense versions of the same mini-games you begin when cooking something as simple as fish & chips. Rotate the analogue stick to stay in line with the green marker when washing food, release the button at the right point when frying, click the button at the right moment when chopping up food. Fortunately, once you’ve mastered a dish by cooking it enough, you can set it to auto-cook. Still, given the number of dishes and how you’ll have to cook the same ones many times to unlock their advanced versions, I grew tired of the mini-games and just wished there had been a couple of different ones to keep things fresh.

I probably played half the game with the fantastic soundtrack by Lena Raine on and the other with it off while I watched something on a different monitor. This is sad because the music is excellent, but if I chose to commit a day or two to simply fishing and cooking, it is so repetitive that I needed something beside me to help. The repetitive nature is key to these sorts of games, but my complaint is that I did not have a new cooking mini-game or a huge surprise fish get on the line, which required my full attention to learn the newly introduced mini-games.

Moonglow Bay features beautiful and bright voxel art. The characters all look fantastic, though it’s the voxel animals like seals and seagulls in the wild that got my heart eyes. I took plenty more screenshots than I’ll be sharing in this review, and catching the sunset at the right location in the water was always an “aww” enticing moment. On a technical side, however, I did run into a lot of frame rate stutter and weird clipping issues playing on PC and even saw characters often walk through one another or other objects.

The mission structure in Moonglow Bay is at times deceivingly straightforward, and others, confusing. The main questline has you tracking down the mysterious fish that has everyone in the bay shaking in their boots, while side quests often have you seeking specific fish or meals to deliver to residents of the island. There is no handy onboarding of this, however, which usually meant I was stuck sorting through menus to double-check what fish or meal a character had requested and if I had it on my person or not. I wish there were a way to select meals and fish (both of which have their own journal sections to give you more information on them), so if you caught or cooked one, a notification could pop up and tell you. Instead, you’re left to think to yourself, “wait, I think someone wanted this fish; let me check before I cook it.”

A handful of other design choices hampered my experience slightly, like having to press up multiple times to select how many fish I wanted to cook instead of a button to select all instantly. Or, when you’re in the ocean, you must manually pick up each lobster trap instead of choosing all instantly. Some of these decisions may be tied to the game using a 24-hour system for your character to sleep periodically. Doing an activity like fishing or placing traps seems to move time forward slightly faster. But I still found these elements frustrating by the end of the journey.

Play

Once you’ve beaten the main questline, there’s still plenty to do in Moonglow Bay, with over 100 fish to be caught and logged in the local Aquarium and all of the dishes to be mastered. As soon as I rolled credits, I was back into the fishing rotation, making meals and placing them in the vending machine outside my store to move-in money. Talking to townspeople will net you hints towards fish locations you haven’t uncovered, so you’re not going to be floundering in the wild if you choose to 100% Moonglow Bay.

I know I have a lot of particular minor complaints about Moonglow Bay, which comes from the type of monotonous game it can be. But I adore my time with the game and would love to go back and complete my fishing and cooking Pokédexs’. Although simple, the narrative touches on relatable themes of rebuilding, both between the player character after losing a loved one and the community of Moonglow Bay as a whole. There’s not an ounce of badwill in this game, and no matter what minor irritations I may have, it’s a very wholesome, relaxing and gorgeous experience.