Songs of Glimmerwick came out on Steam on September 30, eight years after Eastshade Studios started on it. 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. Steam rates it Very Positive, and in English only two people out of the first 91 have given it a thumbs down.
It’s a cozy game where the vegetables are your part-time job and the homework comes written in sheet music.
The launch itself was quiet, though. The game passed 150,000 wishlists back in June, yet two days in only a few hundred people were playing at once, and one fan wrote that they were confused it didn’t have more reviews.
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. Fishing turned out to be a fan favourite, because it’s a rhythm game too and every fish has its own tune.
A calendar that waits for you
The thing people bring up first is time. The calendar moves through seasons and festivals, but it stops for story events and again every evening, so nobody passes out in the middle of the woods or misses a festival because they lost track of the clock. One fan 4.3 hours in described how it works with lessons:
“When you have a class, time stops, so you can run about the school doing whatever you like until you decide to attend without missing class and getting penalised.”
Close behind is the voice acting, which surprised a lot of people in a small indie game. A fan with 5.7 hours put it about as strongly as anyone:
“The best voice acting I've ever encountered in a game. One of the very few times that voice overs have made a video game story captivate me enough to stop skipping through dialogue.”
The flute games worried some people before launch, and owners keep pointing new buyers to the settings, where the spell songs can be made easy enough that a few right notes earn an almost perfect score.
More RPG than farm
Anyone expecting the next Stardew Valley should know what they’re buying. One early owner warns that it’s closer to an RPG than a life sim, with companion quests instead of daily chats and gifts, and there’s no romance, which a few fans list as the one thing they miss. The farming is there to pay for the story, and the quests have you running between characters, brewing a potion for one so another will hand over what you need.
That running is where most of the complaints sit. There’s no fast travel, the pickaxe and axe are slow, and the inventory fills up quickly, all of which The Wand Report flagged in its 8/10 review as well. Some owners would like a brightness slider and a camera that stays zoomed where they left it, and one wants to switch between controller and mouse without going into the settings, since the rhythm games suit a controller and the potion game suits a mouse.
The harshest English review so far comes from a fan of the studio’s earlier games with 11.4 hours in. They point to typos, characters repeating the same lines within the first week, and a story about the years when magic was banned that they found shallow, and they still call it charming rather than bad:
“I only wish the writing had received the same level of care as the art and gameplay systems, and that there had been an overall pass for polish and bug fixing before launch.”
Should you buy it now?
If the school, the people and the island are what draw you in, the first players are about as happy as a launch crowd gets, and Eastshade fans in particular seem to have found what they waited for. Fans of Wytchwood keep coming up as another group it suits. If you want romance, a deep farm to optimise or quick travel around the map, you might wait and see what the first patches add.
It costs $24.99, with 10% off for the first two weeks, and the demo is still up, so you can play the opening couple of hours for free and keep your save. The Supporter Pack ($4.99) adds a hat, a cloak and two extra songs, and the 47-track soundtrack is sold separately. Xbox, PlayStation and Switch versions are coming after the PC release, still without a date.
