Moonglow Bay Review Now Live! (Patreon)

A new review is live, folks! I know it's been a little bit, but I've been caught in the throes of the holidays.

So I went into Moonglow Bay from a very specific angle. The fishing minigame is a time-tested video game trope, but I've always found it so immensely boring. Because of its status as a side activity, it's often an extremely one-note and bland system. And worse, if you do want to engage with it, it often asks you to do so for multiple hours — far longer than its complexity warrants. But I wagered that if someone made a game entirely around the activity instead of throwing it in as a random side system, the dreaded fishing minigame might be fleshed out into something actually fulfilling and satisfying.

And my gamble paid off, but not quite in the way I expected! Moonglow Bay has a whole second half to the game where you cook all those fish you caught that I enjoyed even more, but both halves of this game sing for the same reason: an immensely tactile control scheme. Moonglow Bay has taken immense care to physically emulate the activities you're doing as closely as it can on the controller, so while its fishing might still be pretty simple and effortless, it feels so much better than any other rendition of fishing I've played in a video game.

Next up is the Descent GTDM! It's going to take a few weeks. It's going to push back the year in review videos I usually do and the quarterly wrapup. I'm going to do it anyway. The project's been floating around long enough and gone through enough start-and-stop rough drafts that I'm just going to knuckle down and do it.