A quick bit of a story before we get to the review: On the 4th of July, I went fishing for the first time in years after only doing some fly fishing at school. I spent about 2-hours out on this boat in the middle of the sea, most of which was puking my guts up and I made the captain of the boat say, “I’ve never seen anyone as bad as that.” I was shaking, I was as white as a ghost (ok, Whiter than usual), and I could not keep anything in my system. That captain turned back to the bay to just drop me off because I was that ill, while everyone else had their day.

Moonglow Bay is an indie fishing RPG that set the jig for me back in February/March when I first saw it. Between the voxel art style, the lovely charm spilling from its every gill, and purely how brilliant the idea is yet is hardly ever deployed, I was sold from that moment. This was also one of the reasons I wanted to go see if fishing was something worthwhile for me. It was not, but I got a lovely walk around that bay while reading E-books that day. All in all, fishing has been a mixed experience for me thus far in life, then I was reeled in by BunnyHug’s Moonglow Bay all last week.

It is a little rough around the edges, and I will say out of the gate it is not perfect. However, I think the reason I’ve played hours and hours of it in the week since release is that it is Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing with some more conventional gameplay and a story that is structured to be one of the central pillars holding it up. As I am sure you’ve seen at indie shows surrounding E3 and Xbox’s showcases, you play as the partner of a fisher (literally, that’s your last name) who is the heart and the community of Moonglow Bay (the town not the game). Since your partner’s death, everyone has been scared of the monsters in the black lagoon.

Soon enough you and your daughter (how did they know I’d call my daughter River?) end up broaching into the uncomfortable conversations of going back out into the waters. The town is crumbling with every passing day, lacking tourism or business, leaving nothing more than what The Specials sang about. Starting out just flinging your fishing pole into the bay, (a mistake I’ll never make again) you catch tiny fish and proceed to sell them. You also make food with them from a small freezer outside your house, all before the local punk trades you a vending machine or three.

It sounds oversimplified, but that’s because I was taking things slowly and not rushing into every bit of the story with open arms. I am a Fisher, Mx Fisher to be precise, and I wanted to feed my people, hand in all my first catches to Marina in the Aquarium, and help everyone with their problems. The only thing missing to the Animal Crossing comparison is designing houses, giving a bear some fashion tips, and the local mafia threatening to twist my leg in ways that sound uncomfortable. No, instead, they just rake my bins in the middle of the night until I come out to buy more crab pots which didn’t add to my total.

Within the first few days of release, it would be fair to say there were a few minor bugs. Mostly visual things, an ability to buy crab pots despite having 30 already, and other minuscule things. Though some of those rough edges I hinted at were actually progression, which may be partly due to my slow and not so optimized stream of play, where I was just getting bored of going to X, Y, and Z every now and then. Movement is always going to be an issue for me, and I’m sure the speed at which you do it is a little bit of an issue also, so when I’d played many hours running back and forth across town, I was getting a bit bored.

I wasn’t bored of the game, but of seeing this wind-battered coastal town that is rundown. I wanted to speed things up, I wanted to quickly move about and catch more, which are upgrades you’ll find in Chapter 3 (providing you cooked a lot). Again, I may have been playing a little more “relaxed” in terms of progression, to the point where I was handing in RPG-style quests of “turn in X amount of fish to Marina,” and I was getting the quest after I’d already done it numerically. Though while I am on quests, I think it is worth noting that they are (to some extent) sometimes lacking direction. It is all fine putting something in a text box for the story, but if I forget and the task description isn’t helpful, I am stumbling about in the dark.

In fact, I think that’s kind of a problem overall at this point. There is a lack of accessibility and quality of life features. For example, there are no control remapping options, despite all prompts being circles of the four buttons on an Xbox controller. You can’t alter the timings of the cooking mini-games, which could also help with a more stable frame rate, and the aforementioned directions are a little hoggy. The cooking mini-game issue is the biggest one I have, though specifically not for me as I can get by well enough. I know some people who don’t have reaction times as snappy as my own. Of course, the challenge should be somewhere, but accessibility is still important.

There is a bit of leeway in terms of catching fish and pressing down on RT, so some room around cooking could be useful. The target audience does include those who have mobility issues, those who do have issues pressing buttons as quickly as those filleting mini-games require. I could see where complete frustration would set in while playing those, simply because I was having issues with filleting at first. Maybe I am misunderstanding or I’m overlooking something, but Moonglow Bay isn’t the type of game where frustration seems like the goal. Nevertheless, it is there plain to see.

The game itself is relaxing and it is enjoyable: It should be, I’ve spent an uncomfortable number of hours in the game in a week, and I don’t think I’ll be stopping anytime soon. I’d turned off the in-game music and did what I do when I’m actually cooking, I’d put on a podcast or some of my own music, and I’d just spend a while either fishing or cooking. Then it would be 6-hours later and I had not slept at all that night, because I was out catching every crustacean, cephalopod, and Actinopterygii from the Littoral zone to those that are benthopelagic, like cod.

This is why I say it is Animal Crossing, but more conventional. You can spend more than an hour a day playing, to the point that you are probably on the brink of overfishing. It is the type of game that you can say you want to play a while and it might even drag you into playing a little more because you are lost in it. Between the colors, the style, and the simple-yet-effective gameplay, it reels you in and mounts you on the wall as another victim of the great purge of people stressed to high doh from the world that surrounds us every day. Putting aside the frustrations, it is a comfy pair of slippers to come home to and let the world slip away.

That said, the cooking mini-game does get old quickly, and it gets worse as you advance up the cookbook. After cooking each dish a number of times, you’ll get a little three-star rating of your quality inside the cookbook, separate from the individual three-star rating after cooking which tells you how well that meal is when you are selling it. This cookbook star rating is building up to the point where you can auto-cook a meal with a perfect three stars when selling it. That is a great idea to cut out the middle man. You start out with frying, chopping, washing, boiling, and baking, with the only additions being chopping with a meat clever and cutting with a filleting knife.

My problem, and maybe I’m being a pedant here, is that once you are in the more expensive and more detailed dishes, it doesn’t get easier. Washing is still the same chasing the blue bar within the long bar, boiling is chasing a line in a circle, and so on. Why does the bar not become slightly bigger once you’ve gotten to the bigger and grander dishes? It is still boiling, it is the same for every other dish you boil, so why not make it easier over time? Chopping I can somewhat understand as keeping the same because you want different cuts for different dishes with different fish, there is a reason for it.

It is a little thing, but I think it would have made cooking (especially the more specialist dishes) so much more enjoyable to do throughout. Sure, I was getting a little bored of pulling up one fish at a time before you get the multi-lure, and crab fishing is something you just have to fudge if you are playing single-player. I liked that actually, the co-op just being drop-in and drop-out. It meant I could go off and fish tuna for a bit and do whatever I needed to do, and out of nowhere I could have River appear to pick up the crab pots as I drove along or we could fish together. That’s the type of thing for kids and parents or partners to enjoy from time to time without feeling overburdened by another person having to be there all the time to progress.

What I found annoying was the dog. I love the dog and I like being able to pat him and love him, but I really want to tell him to move or stay somewhere so I don’t get stuck behind him. I almost entirely lost progression because I went into the vending machine outside of the Goto house/shop and got stuck between the building, a sign, the vending machine, and the dog. Also, I disliked being given a task from the community board of “I need to talk to you” from everyone in-town, and if you have a main quest with them you are locked to whatever you received first. For example, I have to hand this woman a bit of food, but I also have a main quest to hand in, and honestly, I don’t want to give her this single dish that is just giving her a free meal.

Ultimately, Moonglow Bay is filled with charm and charisma within every scale on its body, and while it smells a bit sickeningly like fish, you’ll still love it. It is simple and enjoyable because it is Animal Crossing, somewhere that isn’t exploding and jumping up and down with klaxons going off in the background. It is a happy little adventure filled with fishing and continuing your wife’s legacy, and I love that.

An Xbox One copy of the Moonglow Bay was provided by Coatsink for the purposes of this review.

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Moonglow Bay

$25

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• A warm and cuddly story, emotional and touching.
• Simple and effective gameplay elements.
• Inclusivity; Mx, they/them, and ramps.
• Seeing the town change from my work.

Cons

• Often frame-rate issues.
• A little buggy and rough.
• Lacking in accessibility.