// KOTAKU — GAMING
I’m Having A Great Time With This Musical Witch School Farm Sim Even If I’m Always Late To Class
Okay, so, there’s a curse on the mill. A goblin put it there, it doesn’t really matter why. I need the mill to work so I can buy a blueberry pastry to give to the ferry girl so she’ll go do her job of running the ferry, which she refuses to do without a baked good I guess. In order to learn the song that will uncurse the mill, I need to travel to the mountains. I don’t know where the mountains are, because I just arrived on this island a little over a week ago. I think it’s possible they’re to the north, but the north is blocked off by a big tree root right now. I’m not sure how to get rid of it, but one of my classmates at the Etchery just invented a potion that can reverse plant growth, and I want to see if that will do the trick. But in order to make the potion, I need a specific flower that I don’t currently have. I’ve purchased flower seeds and planted them in my garden, and it’ll be a few days before they bloom. In the meantime, I’ve just figured out how to fish, I’ve got a tabletop campaign going, and at some point, someone will probably want me to attend class.
That’s where I’m at in Songs of Glimmerwick right now. This game is from the developer of Eastshade, a game I loved very, very dearly back in 2019. It’s taken me a little longer to become enchanted with Glimmerwick in the same way, but I am slowly moving in that direction. Eastshade immediately captivated me with its strong sense of place. It was a game about learning and loving every cranny of a small, intimate, beautiful island. Glimmerwick is different. It’s about going to magic school. Musical magic school! I arrived by boat one day without plan or intent and found, surprise, my name was on the student roster. A kindly flutemaker made me a flute—no wands here—and the kindly villagers in the nearby town provided my uniform and school supplies gratis. Normal college experience right here!
Glimmerwick‘s magic system is entirely music-based: you learn spells by playing short rhythm charts. A minimum, easy enough score is required to learn the spell and be able to cast it without playing the whole thing every time, but if you score highly you can improve the impact of the spell each time. Potionmaking, similarly, is a fun little ingredient-sorting game that will result in better-quality potions the better you do. Fishing is also a rhythm game, where each fish seemingly has its own melody, immediately making it one of my favorite fishing minigames I’ve ever played. The songs I’ve learned so far are mostly useful for manipulating the environment: I can magic the hoe and the pick and the axe to clean up the brush for me while I focus on seed planting. I suspect some, later on, may be useful for interacting with all the mysterious, clearly magical landmarks around campus. Right now, the Etchery feels quite small for a premiere magical school, but as with all magical schools, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Songs of Glimmerwick is not a game with a sense of urgency. Entire days pass where nothing at all really happens, I think because it wants to leave room for itself to be a farming sim. But there is an underlying story that I’m quite curious about, one that seems like it wants to touch on ideas like religious zealotry and prescriptivism, as well as on who is allowed to make decisions for the collective whole. The main character is a fairly neutral, customizable stand-in for the player, but I sort of wish they weren’t. Their backstory of escaping fundamentalism at any cost, and inadvertently stumbling upon the exact antidote to their own history that they were seeking, is really interesting. I want to know more about this person without assuming it’s just…me, but I’m not sure I will.
Conversely, I find most of the main characters a bit bland. Certainly very few are memorable. I think some of this is that Glimmerwick‘s camera is pulled so far back to showcase its gorgeous fantasy world (really, it’s lovely) that I can’t tell anyone apart at a glance, especi