Previously released on Steam and now ported to consoles, Moonglow Bay is a slice-of-life fishing game set in 1980s Canada. After a devastating loss, the protagonist must move on with their life and help revive the town they live in: a struggling fishing port.
Obviously, as a fishing-based game, there’s a large amount of fishing to be done in Moonglow Bay. Fishing mechanics are simple to follow and come in a variety of different actions. You can use the standard rod, line, and bait, with customisation options for each leading to many combinations to try. There’s also ice fishing — which is unlocked later — lobster traps, and a net, which allows you to reel in multiple catches at once if you cast it correctly.
Your protagonist’s dream is to revive Moonglow Bay using funds obtained from their home cooking business. You’ll unlock recipes by mastering existing ones and shopping for them, and recipes can be cooked using your home kitchen or on board your trawler. You can obtain a rating out of three stars for each dish cooked, depending on how well you complete a series of quick-time events. Getting three stars will help you achieve mastery, unlocking recipes and ultimately being able to cook a dish perfectly at the press of one button.
Residents of Moonglow Bay will dish out quests that only you can solve. A lot of these quests involve going out to sea, coming back, and sometimes going out to sea again. This repetition and constant back and forth gets old quite quickly. Sometimes it’s so unclear what needs to be done, with quest markers and descriptions being no help whatsoever — we often progressed a quest out of pure luck rather than understanding what needed to be done.
Moonglow Bay is also absolutely riddled with bugs to a frustrating degree. During our playthrough, we encountered everything from textures popping in suddenly, NPCs glitching on the spot, and the game bricking and refusing to save. No matter how much we were enjoying the gameplay, encountering these issues was more than annoying, losing a lot of progress on a lot of missions.
Moonglow Bay has a lot of promise; it’s easy to spend hours with it when it’s working properly. But when it’s not, it turns into a nightmare you don’t want to revisit. The cosy vibes of the gameplay, fun characters, and enjoyable fishing and cooking mechanics don’t make up for fundamental errors with the game that really mar the rest of the experience.