Moonglow Bay

 PC
Metascore
63

Mixed or average reviews - based on 11 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 11
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 11
  3. Negative: 1 out of 11
  1. Cubed3
    Feb 13, 2023
    40
    A super-calm mix of fishing, cooking, business management, and town-restoring RPG, Moonglow Bay is a decent idea that wasn't executed that well, and is thus very boring and repetitive. It also struggles with making you care about anything. Players do things just to do them, with the tiniest sense of progress possible. Take your fishing rod and fish somewhere else.
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  1. Polygon
    Oct 27, 2021
    The slow pace and gentle yet solemn storytelling — with lots of bright, joyous moments, too — is delightful, and I’m eager to learn more about Moonglow Bay and its people, in a town shaped as much by fishing as it is by grief.
  2. Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    Oct 25, 2021
    The game's story keeps unravelling towards a genuinely tearjerking ending, digging into its themes of community, resilience, and rebuilding in surprising and consistently interesting ways. It keeps a steady, compelling rhythm, switching between the normal fishing and cooking to something more dramatic and then back again. And watching the town slowly come back to life, not despite setbacks but building on what they leave behind, is beautiful.

User Reviews

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User Score
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No user score yet- Awaiting 1 more rating

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 3
  3. Negative: 2 out of 3
  1. 3t3rnal
    Feb 5, 2022
    3
    Moonglow Bay could have been either a nice casual fishing and cooking game, or a challenging business simulator game. It tries to go both waysMoonglow Bay could have been either a nice casual fishing and cooking game, or a challenging business simulator game. It tries to go both ways and as a result, gets nowhere. Yet, it is still charming in a few ways and a few of the gameplay elements are fun and engaging. So why the negative rating? Technical issues and lack of polish.

    First of, the graphics and the design - the game has a Minecraft+ style, blocky but some detail, and as mentioned, it is pretty charming. Unfortunately, the quality is kinda all over the place. You have locations that are well designed and with a lot of attention to detail, and then you just have other locations that are mostly empty, or they look hastily thrown together. Some of the parts of the game are also in a hand drawn (I guess?) 2D - and it has a very high quality and looks good. It just doesn't really fit for me, it's very out of place for the overall style.

    Sound is okay, the music is okay, a bit bland and generic "casual game" style. Same goes for the ambience. It's good enough, but it's nothing memorable.

    Story wise, it's a slice of life story with some play at emotions. I have seen it praised, but I honestly found it to be a bit bland. It tries to go for the feels way too soon, before I was even immersed into the world, it was already "feel-sad-baiting". The lore of the game, or rather the locations where it takes place, is pretty funny and interesting, though. Also, the narrative has a mild case of "the woke".

    The gameplay, as mentioned at the beginning, is kinda all over the place. The fishing is pretty interesting and fun at first, but there's a completely unnecessary mechanic that allows you to cheese through it. You can of course decide not to use it, but the fact that it even is in the game the way it is makes me question how much playtesting was done. I have a feeling it wasn't much.

    The cooking is also pretty fun, and it has no exploits as far as I know, but the QTEs that are part of it have pretty inaccurate button push/release registration and as the resulting food quality depends on how precisely you do the QTEs, you sometimes get screwed over.

    Finally, there's the business part and the economy. The business part is undercooked, literally. You cook a batch of food, and put it out to sell. But you don't really see how much of what you are selling, etc. Daily, one food gets a bonus, and one a negative status, increasing / decreasing price, but since you don't know how much stuff is left, and which types are sold out or not, you don't know what effect it has on you. You also can't take foods that are already being sold out of the stock and return them once their price increases. There is also no real simulation of demand besides these random statuses, so you can literally spam one type of food - the easiest to make that you can make out of all / most of the fish you catch, and just cheese it this way.

    For some recipes - most actually, you will also need different ingredients. You have unlimited amount of them in your kitchen, but you pay for them when you take them out of your fridge. And my question is, why even have this in? Like, just stop at the point where "you have unlimited other ingredients", remove the paying for them, and reduce the sell price of the foods. It's also not balanced well, and it's literally just more profitable to spam some cheaper foods instead - not to mention that you are supposed to have a fast food stall, and most of the stuff you cook is anything but fastfood, and a lot of fastfood recipes are not available.

    Also, the way fish works is stupid - you get fish, they have weight, etc. - but it does not matter - 1 fish = 1 meal. If the game was trying to stay casual, alright, fine, but it's trying to do this business thing, and it makes no sense. A 40kg fish, allows you to make one batch of fish cakes. So does a 4kg one... How is that even a thing?

    You can also donate fish to local aquarium, and it boosts your sale price - supposedly, I actually didn't see any change, and also, once when I donated fish, the aquarium only accepted some (all were new species), and not the rest - but they still got taken out of my inventory, so I had to donate another specimens of those species...

    Furthermore, there's a bunch of issues with random invisible walls, or places where the ground ends before the hitbox so you float above sea with your character in the parts where you are not on your boat, and so on.

    It just feels hastily thrown together - someone had a cool idea, but not enough patience - or skil, or both - to pull it off. And it's a damn shame, because the premise of the game is really fun, hell some of it is already here - fishing without the quickreeling, some aspects of the cooking, the long list of different and fairly distinct species of fish and other sea creatures... It just isn't done well.    … Full Review »
  2. fluffysquee
    Oct 28, 2021
    2
    Do not play this game - yet.
    This is a game with easy to understand mechanics that are engaging, a lovable setting, all wrapped up with    Do not play this game - yet.
    This is a game with easy to understand mechanics that are engaging, a lovable setting, all wrapped up with wonderful music and presentation; the only problem is that all of the games upsides are buried under a mountain of technical (and some design) issues that make the game completely unplayable. You'll find scripting errors, menu locking, progress locking, movement obstruction, intense frame rate dips, horrible camera angles, multiple songs playing at the same time, confusing and unexplained controls, and more all within the first 30 minutes of your play time. It is not worth your time in its current state; it's hard to imagine they even play tested with the wealth of bugs and glitches in this small scale game.
    I have hope it could one day be a charming and relaxing game but as of its state on release, it is unplayable and frustrating.    … Full Review »
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