Beforehand launched on Steam and now ported to consoles, Moonglow Bay is a slice-of-life fishing recreation set in Nineteen 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 recreation, there’s a considerable amount of fishing to be carried out in Moonglow Bay. Fishing mechanics are easy to comply with and are available quite a lot of totally different actions. You should utilize 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 without delay when 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 will be cooked utilizing your house kitchen or on board your trawler. You possibly can receive a score out of three stars for every dish cooked, relying on how properly you full a sequence of quick-time occasions. Getting three stars will assist you 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 possibly can resolve. Quite a lot of these quests contain going out to sea, coming again, and generally going out to sea once more. This repetition and fixed forwards and backwards will get previous fairly rapidly. Generally it is so unclear what must be carried out, with quest markers and descriptions being no assist in anyway — we frequently progressed a quest out of pure luck relatively than understanding what wanted to be carried out.
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 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, dropping a number of progress on a number of missions.
Moonglow Bay has a number 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 actually mar the remainder of the expertise.