Songs of Glimmerwick comes out on Steam on September 30. You play a new student at a university of magic on a wooded island, where spells are songs you play on a flute, and most of your days go to lessons, friends and a garden that is badly overgrown when you inherit it. The free demo has been up since April, and by the time the game went into Steam Next Fest in June it had passed 150,000 wishlists.
It’s a cozy game where the vegetables are your part-time job and the homework comes written in sheet music.
Spells you play on a flute
Glimmerwick runs on a school calendar. There are classes to turn up to (Potion 101 with Professor Sylvine is one of the first), clubs after school, and a part-time job in the university garden, where you grow normal vegetables next to the magical ones and drop the harvest into a garden well at the end of the day to get paid. You use songs for nearly everything else. One calls rain clouds over the crops, and others let you talk to trees, make your tools work on their own while you do something else, or lift the ground so you can climb to parts of the island you couldn’t reach before.
There’s plenty to do when school is out: fishing, diving for shells, a band, and forest trips with a club called the Green Sprites. All the characters are voiced, even the minor ones, and the skill tree has the usual gardening and trading upgrades plus a few stranger ones, like Tongue of Frog, which lets you talk to amphibians. The calendar moves through seasons and festivals, although Eastshade chose to freeze time during story events and again every evening. In one of their devlogs they explain they wanted the ebb and flow of a farming sim without the constant pressure of the clock.
What people made of the demo
The demo covers the opening of the game, a bit over two hours of it (the studio joked that most Steam experts would call that way too long for a demo), and your save carries over to the full release. Eastshade says the median score on its own feedback form was a 9, and that the complaint it heard most was that the demo ended too soon. Press previews from April were mostly warm about the hand-drawn art and about the townsfolk, who wander off to live their own lives rather than standing around waiting for you to talk to them.
There were rough spots. Getting around the menus was awkward, the gardening tutorial didn’t make much sense on a controller, and So Many Games found the quests a bit too close to the farming chores, hoping for more creativity in them. Some players felt rushed by the clock, and within two days of the demo going up the studio stopped time in menus and shops and added tutorials on how the clock works. The music game behind each spell caused some worry as well, which is why Danny Weinbaum keeps repeating this in the patch notes:
“I will mention (as I will continue to mention forever more) that the music mini game is by no means a mandatory part of the game. You can pretty much skip it and never touch it again if you like.”
You can still play the songs properly if you want to. A better performance earns stars, and stars make a spell stronger and cheaper to cast, but a spell works without any.
Worth buying on launch day?
Eastshade fans will probably have it wishlisted already. For everyone else it helps to know what kind of cozy game this is. The garden pays your way, but the store page sells it as a story-driven RPG, and most of your time goes to the school, the people and the island, so if a big farm to optimise is what you’re after, this probably isn’t that game.
The price still isn’t on the Steam page. A Supporter Pack with a hat, a cloak and two extra songs launches the same day, and so does the 47-track soundtrack. If you’re unsure, the demo is free, takes a couple of hours, and your save carries over. On Xbox, PlayStation or Switch you’ll have to wait, since those versions come after the PC release and don’t have a date yet.
