Investing your hard-earned cash on something that benefits everyone. There’s a feel-good factor to this gameplay loop. Rows of trees bring life to the seaside and new licks of paint and general DIY help tidy up tired houses. No more rundown buildings and bags of trash littering the street. In renovating the town, you increase the sale price of your goods, but you also make Moonglow Bay a more aesthetically pleasing place to be. Catch a certain fish, bring them a specific type of food. These interactions are little more than a line or two of dialogue, though and the task itself is often rather basic, too.
You’ll still be able to interact with them somewhat passively via the town’s Bulletin Board where you can pick up requests to earn Shells (the game’s currency) to spend on upgrades for your ship, ingredients for cooking, recipes, or primarily on renovating the different buildings around town. This is a slice-of-life sim, and before I even finished the story, many of the characters became nothing more than additional decoration to make Moonglow Bay feel like less of a ghost town than it really is. Many of them would simply turn me away, informing me now wasn’t a good time to talk, or that they’d simply told me everything they had to. However, after about 5 hours in, I’d seemingly exhausted the need to speak to the locals. Listening to fact-lite descriptions that border on ridiculous, only to find the species they were describing was rather tame in comparison. At first, they’ll tell you intriguing tales of different species of fish out at sea, and it’s all quite whimsical and mysterious. Moonglow Bay has residents that you’ll find standing around on the beaches, in the streets, or working at one of the few stores. This lack of depth permeates through much of the rest of the game, too.
It’s functional and is initially gratifying enough to engage with, but it’s not long before it becomes tedious - particularly so, given this is the primary means of making money in the game and you’re doing a heck of a lot of it. Wash, chop, fillet, bake, fry, and so on. Similarly, the act of cooking different dishes distills down to various combinations of different mini-games. The likes of ice fishing mix this premise up a little bit later on in the story, but it’s still very much a basic mini-game that doesn’t provide the kind of depth I’d expect from a game based primarily around fishing. There are different baits and lure types here to help you attract different kinds of fish, but the core mechanic remains the same and is too simple to not feel a little tired by the end. Unfortunately, the act of fishing can be distilled down to casting your rod out, yanking it a few times to reel in your catch a little quicker, and then rinsing and repeating. Given this is a slice-of-life fishing sim, then, you’d expect the fishing mechanics to have a half-decent level of complexity to it. Its core themes of friendship, community, and essentially, being environmentally friendly are a heartwarming combo and make for a suitably feel-good atmosphere throughout, regardless of the turbulent tides that your character - and the rest of Moonglow Bay - face.
There’s a lot of heart and charm that has been packed into its story and dialog, and a lot of things I love Moonglow Bay for as a result. So, surprise surprise, it’s down to you to kickstart the industry by catching the freshest fish the bay has to offer. A town once known for its fishing industry is now home to citizens scared of setting sail after having heard folk tales of monsters sending the unsuspected to a watery death. After a horrible accident, your partner has been killed and you’re left in the rundown town of Moonglow Bay, determined to have another go at making a living fishing and selling your produce as your late beloved had always wanted you to. Moonglow Bay’s story premise is simple enough. And now after now having now spent over 15 hours soaking up the sights and sounds of Moonglow Bay, I’m not sure all the reeling was quite worth the catch. Fishing, cooking, earning money, helping renovate a rather tired town - Sign me up, I thought! The reality of playing the game, though, wasn’t quite as compelling as I had hoped. Moonglow Bay had me from the moment I laid eyes on its gorgeous voxel art visuals, and the promise of a slice-of-life fishing sim and all the trivial tasks that come part and parcel of that was a gameplay loop I couldn’t wait to engage with.