Moonglow Bay

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0700

I so badly wanted to love Moonglow Bay from the moment I saw its trailer at Wholesome Direct 2021. Your late spouse loved the titular Canadian small town until the day they disappeared in its ocean. Years later, it stands on the brink of economic collapse and it’s up to you to combine their passion for fishing with your love of cooking to save it. Teaming up with your daughter, River, who drags you out of widowed depression, you sail the voxel-art seas in search of fish both familiar and fantastical—and then chop them up into meals for the townspeople. Reinvesting their lunch money into town renovations slowly transforms a languishing municipality into a booming tourist location, and people love you for it.

When so many problems in the real world feel insurmountably big, saving a small town by putting homemade fishcakes in a vending machine is exactly the kind of videogame magical escapism I’m here for. Unfortunately, Moonglow Bay plays like my persuasive speech in seventh grade English class: solid for about thirty seconds, and then painfully bad for its long remainder. By over-emphasizing its most tedious gameplay elements, failing to achieve cohesive design, and retaining a shockingly large number of near-game-breaking bugs months after release, this game scores lower than most I’ve reviewed.

Let’s dive right into this (fish) roast. After a brief tutorial, you’re told to get out there and talk to people; make friends! I chatted up the twenty-something techy, Haru. He immediately told me he hoped “that vending machine” was working out. What vending machine? Oh, the one that I won’t actually get for another three hours of gameplay. Cool, cool. I later buy said vending machine, but the game doesn’t register that this happened. I remain stuck on this quest until I later buy another completely unrelated item from Haru.

An identity crisis starts to emerge when my largely nautical experience is disrupted by the ability to disembark and do some light walking exploration. In town, this is painful, as any elevation change results in weird voxel-clipping that makes it entirely unclear when I can safely go up or down steps. Out on the sea, I walk for fifteen minutes along a gigantic ice bluff that’s so tall (and evidently not designed to walk on) that it clips out of the camera’s range. Turns out there’s nothing to find—not even a cool view—and there was no reason for the game to let me come here.

On my way back, I find a research outpost and a cave with a lever mechanism. I try interacting with it, only to be scolded by River saying that I obviously don’t know what I’m doing. She’s never actually animated in the world, but still randomly shows up to yell at me or inch the plot along. As it happens, her scolding is a useful hint for a late-game quest if you’re stuck in the cave at that point, but means nothing for the first 70% of the game where for whatever reason it still triggers. At this point, my feelings as a player are like:

Narrative discontinuity and quest progression issues aside, you’d think that Moonglow Bay could at least nail its core fishing mechanic. Taken in isolation, catching a big one is, in fact, satisfying. There’s a nice balance of reeling in the right direction with timing of strong pulls that makes the minigame feel more like a cartoon simplification of fishing in Red Dead Redemption 2 than a beefed up version of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley.

But so much of this game is catching specific fish—you need at least 90 species to complete the story and a good variety to cook the more advanced meals—and Moonglow Bay chooses to make that experience deeply frustrating. Listening to townspeople’s tall tales gives hints about possible species locations, but fails to narrow down the numerous combinations of rod type, lure type, bait type, specific fishing hole, and time of day at which to catch said fish at said location (there can easily be over 50 unique combinations of the above factors—per fish!). Some locations aren’t locations at all, but rather regions that take up an entire quarter of the map. Other information is only accessible after bonding with certain friends (fair enough), but come in the form of one-time hints that aren’t recorded in your fishing journal. Either you realize you need to take notes yourself, or you’re resorting to Google later.

Cooking is yet another decent idea turned tedious. Each recipe has some fish ingredients to gather and then a series of steps to prepare. Each step (washing, chopping, filleting, frying, boiling, and baking) is a dexterity-based minigame. While your fellow Moonglow residents simply tell you that the more you cook, the more likely you are to be inspired to invent new recipes, the reality is that you need to cook each recipe perfectly (no dexterity mistakes!) up to nine(!) times to unlock yet another repetitive cooking experience composed of the same minigames. There is an option to “batch cook” multiple meals of the same recipe simultaneously, but wait, those only count as one meal cooked towards the new recipe unlocks. And did I mention there are 60 recipes in the game? You do the math on that time sink.

Then there’s the fact that the boat handles like crap, especially in a certain late-game region, which leads to complete jank like this:

I succeed in suspending my boat in midair, fishing some inanimate objects, and then sending my boat careening off map where a cutscene that I’ve already seen replays, this time with River talking to no one.

Moonglow Bay’s bright voxel art, excellent gender representation, and ostensibly chill vibes should have made it an easy win in my book. Too bad it seized every opportunity to take that vision down with the ship.

Overcooked

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 12:00:00 -0700

I am a panda wielding a kitchen knife, desperately hacking away at as many onions as physically possible and subsequently littering the floor with chopped produce. The noise level in our living room steadily rises as my sister and I frantically shout back and forth at each other; the culinary space station we’ve been thrust into is about to rotate, and we’ll have a very narrow window before the station rotates again to ferry all the onions into another room where pots will transform them into delicious soups. But the discord is quickly joined by my brother, finding himself caught on the wrong side of an airlock, holding clean bowls for a set of soups that are nearly finished cooking. In a few moments, those soups will burn and set that section of the kitchen on fire; onions are bumped and kicked aside as my panda and my sister’s black bear accidentally dash into one another in our simultaneous attempts to get to the fire extinguisher. Orders are being missed, dirty dishes are piling up, soups are burning, tempers are fraying, and — most importantly — hilarity is ensuing. This is Overcooked.

Set with the task of avoiding certain apocalyptic doom caused by the appearance of a spaghetti monster that cannot be sated, players (controlling cartoon people and anthropomorphic animals) are sent back in time to hone their teamwork and culinary abilities. These cooperative teams of 1–4 players face challenges in cooking a variety of dishes, each introducing its own unique mechanics, in a variety of environments, each with its own hazards. Continuous failure to learn each level’s unspoken rules and strategies quickly is more often a source of comedy than of frustration, and any attempts to rely on a comfort strategy are almost always usurped by little surprises to further refine your growing culinary expertise.

For the most part, each level is fairly straightforward: obtain ingredients, chop them, assemble them into dishes, cook those dishes, plate them, serve them, and literally rinse and repeat by washing the dirty plates when they’re returned. The faster dishes are served, the more money they’re worth, and a score of 1 (passing) to 3 (perfect) stars can be scored on each level depending on the total money earned. The numerous ways each stage of preparation overlaps with the others offers more than enough material for flustering and amusing kitchen accidents, but it’s the small mechanics tweaks and zany interactions between the players and their environment that keep the already incredible core experience fresh throughout the course of the game. Mishaps abound, such as accidentally throwing away clean dishes instead of handing them to another player or slipping off an iceberg holding a finished pizza.

Although the game can be played alone (wherein a single player controls multiple avatars and switches between them), Overcooked’s hilarity of mistakes (and mistakes on top of mistakes) combined with the thrill of (eventual) success is best experienced with friends. In an age where couch co-op is largely ignored in the wake of big screen multiplayer titles, Overcooked not only succeeds in creating a satisfying co-op experience but adds innovative elements beyond the usual cooking game. If Overcooked were a meal, then Ghost Town Games has prepared us something truly wonderful and family-style; my compliments to the chefs.

cooking | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Moonglow Bay

Overcooked