Beforehand launched on Steam and now ported to consoles, Moonglow Bay is a slice-of-life fishing sport set in Eighties Canada. After a devastating loss, the protagonist should transfer on with their life and assist revive the city they dwell in: a struggling fishing port.
Clearly, as a fishing-based sport, there’s a considerable amount of fishing to be finished in Moonglow Bay. Fishing mechanics are easy to observe and are available in quite a lot of completely different actions. You need to use the usual rod, line, and bait, with customisation choices for every resulting in many mixtures to attempt. There’s additionally ice fishing — which is unlocked later — lobster traps, and a web, which lets you reel in a number of catches directly in case you forged it appropriately.
Your protagonist’s dream is to revive Moonglow Bay utilizing funds obtained from their residence cooking enterprise. You’ll unlock recipes by mastering current ones and purchasing for them, and recipes might be cooked utilizing your private home kitchen or on board your trawler. You may get hold of a score out of three stars for every dish cooked, relying on how nicely you full a sequence of quick-time occasions. Getting three stars will show you how to obtain mastery, unlocking recipes and in the end having the ability to cook 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 remedy. Plenty 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 any way — we regularly progressed a quest out of pure luck quite than understanding what wanted to be finished.
Moonglow Bay can be completely riddled with bugs to a irritating diploma. Throughout our playthrough, we encountered every little thing from textures popping in out of the blue, NPCs glitching on the spot, and the sport bricking and refusing to avoid wasting. Irrespective of how a lot we have been having fun with the gameplay, encountering these points was greater than annoying, shedding numerous progress on numerous missions.
Moonglow Bay has numerous 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 gratifying fishing and cooking mechanics don’t make up for basic errors with the sport that actually mar the remainder of the expertise.