Preview | Songs of Glimmerwick - Bumbling through the Beautiful Outdoors

I recently received a preview code from Eastshade Studios to play the opening hours of the upcoming game Songs of Glimmerwick. Within a day of activating this code, the preview copy updated into the publicly available demo. From my experience with the demo, which is still available, I can say that this cozy and seemingly frictionless game still gave me a really hard time.

Songs of Glimmerwick is looking to join the popular farming-game and life-sim marriages like Stardew Valley and Fields of Mistria, with the potential to evolve into a story-driven RPG according to the game’s Steam page. You play as a travelling witch from another land intent on attending Glimmerwick University and learning magic, as it was banned until recently and remained absent from your former home. As a student, you take on the part-time job of gardening between attending lessons on the history and practice of magic through song.

What immediately stood out about the game was its presentation and production. The art style is gorgeous, vibrant, and wonderfully immersed in natural splendour, where the flora is composed with various proportions and with the density of an old-growth forest. The lighting and smoothness of motion — even on my low-end laptop — complemented the look of the game moreso. The soundtrack was consistently pleasant and often elicited fond memories of Hollow Knight’s quieter moments, and all of the dialogue was voiced (barring some absent lines which were seemingly glitches), providing the game with an impressively broad scope.

For the most part, characters gave the impression that all was perfect and the biggest of their problems were relatively minor. The exceptions to this, like with the Animal Crossing games, were the most memorable denizens and the ones that will beckon me back when the full game releases in the future. The player’s chaotic and experimental roommate, a student who spends most of their time using a crystal ball for the fantasy equivalent of video calling, and a moderately judgemental tailor were my favourites of the bunch. I hope to see a few more characters who push against the whims of the player in the complete version.

Glimmerwick as a setting was interesting, though not groundbreaking, from its opening hours. Despite the obvious comparison to Witch Hat Atelier with magic schools, witches, and robes, the setting reminded me most of The Legend of Zelda franchise’s Hyrule. Different humanoid species coexist in a fantasy world rich in dense nature, eschewing a more urban setting or one defined by open spaces. The performance of magic through song — for which your character chooses a flute as the medium — was by far the most memorable thing about the setting, and the least functional in the gameplay.

Despite all the positives I’ve given so far, I hate to admit that Songs of Glimmerwick had a rough start for me, even if it was apparent that the game would become more enjoyable to me if I’d been able to play for a few more hours past the demo’s content. A great deal of time is spent expositing the world and readying the player to become a student in the traditional sense (obtaining gear and a uniform, for example) meaning that it takes far too long for the verbs of gameplay and the goals of a playthrough to be introduced. Had there been a playable sequence to tease the ambitions the player character had in mind when leaving home, much of this could have been avoided and a clearer picture of what I should have been anticipating could have been painted. As it stands, if you look to explore and talk to every NPC like I did, it could be more than an hour before you are allowed to perform your first spells, and it took me another hour after that to figure out how they work.

That being said, this could very much be a “me issue”, as I did look up some playthroughs of the demo and didn’t see my concerns raised by other players. However, both when playing with a controller and the brief time I spent trying keyboard and mouse, it took far too long to figure it out. The fun and intuitive part was performing a brief Guitar Hero-esque mini game to learn and master a spell with my flute. Afterward, I had to select the spell from a hotbar after guessing its effect (as I couldn’t find a helpful description anywhere in the menus), choose where I wanted the spell’s effect to happen, and then press two separate buttons to cast the spell, only one of which was denoted onscreen. After all of this, I had to wait a second for an animation to happen in the environment whilst my character didn’t react to anything, meaning that there was always a short window where I found myself second guessing whether my actions were taken correctly.

To add salt to the wound, some of the buttons used during this procedure only seemed to have functions during the spellcasting mode, and about half of the buttons on the controller seemed to pull up different parts of the game’s menus. Furthermore, these menus are tutorialised and the skill tree is explained before any of its effects can be felt or most of the upgradable actions can be performed, overloading me with information and systems early on that weren’t yet necessary or even helpful to learn. The option to improve my spellcasting or potion brewing abilities was available to me before I had experienced trying either. When I was encouraged to spend my acquired skill points during a tutorial, I mistakenly upgraded my potion brewing, which I wasn’t able to do at that juncture. This also meant that I would never feel the impact of the upgrade by the time I was given the ability to brew potions. Like I said earlier, it was a rough start.

The potential of Songs of Glimmerwick is extremely easy to discern, both from its marketing and from the demo. As a caveat to my mixed description about the opening hours, I have enjoyed and been able to recommend games that take more time to find their footing than this demo allowed, but I can’t deny that what I played was a poor introduction to the game packed with burdensome introductory content. Despite my experience, I left the demo of Songs of Glimmerwick with a plan to keep an eye out for the full release because of the game’s aesthetic and its promised potential.