Beforehand launched on Steam and now ported to consoles, Moonglow Bay is a slice-of-life fishing recreation set in Eighties Canada. After a devastating loss, the protagonist should transfer on with their life and assist revive the city they reside in: a struggling fishing port.
Clearly, as a fishing-based recreation, there’s a considerable amount of fishing to be finished in Moonglow Bay. Fishing mechanics are easy to observe and are available a wide range of totally different actions. You need to use the usual rod, line, and bait, with customisation choices for every resulting in many combos to strive. There’s additionally ice fishing — which is unlocked later — lobster traps, and a web, which lets you reel in a number of catches without delay should you forged it appropriately.
Your protagonist’s dream is to revive Moonglow Bay utilizing funds obtained from their house cooking enterprise. You’ll unlock recipes by mastering present ones and searching for them, and recipes may be cooked utilizing your own home kitchen or on board your trawler. You possibly can get hold of a ranking out of three stars for every dish cooked, relying on how effectively you full a sequence of quick-time occasions. Getting three stars will assist you obtain mastery, unlocking recipes and finally with the ability to prepare dinner a dish completely on the press of 1 button.
Residents of Moonglow Bay will dish out quests that solely you’ll be able to clear up. A whole lot of these quests contain going out to sea, coming again, and typically going out to sea once more. This repetition and fixed backwards and forwards will get previous fairly rapidly. Typically it is so unclear what must be finished, with quest markers and descriptions being no assist in anyway — we frequently progressed a quest out of pure luck reasonably than understanding what wanted to be finished.
Moonglow Bay can also be completely riddled with bugs to a irritating diploma. Throughout our playthrough, we encountered all the things from textures popping in all of a sudden, NPCs glitching on the spot, and the sport bricking and refusing to save lots of. Irrespective of how a lot we had been having fun with the gameplay, encountering these points was greater than annoying, dropping loads of progress on loads of missions.
Moonglow Bay has loads of promise; it’s straightforward to spend hours with it when it’s working correctly. However when it’s not, it turns right into a nightmare you don’t need to revisit. The cosy vibes of the gameplay, enjoyable characters, and pleasant fishing and cooking mechanics don’t make up for basic errors with the sport that basically mar the remainder of the expertise.