Songs of Glimmerwick (Demo) ★★★★☆
Songs of Glimmerwick, the silence needs to be broken!
Become immersed in a musical woodland fantasy world where casting a spell is as easy as playing a song. Attend classes, grow the university garden, make friends with classmates and townsfolk, and explore the island’s many oddities and mysteries in this story-driven witch academy RPG.
Videos:
- N/A
- Gameplay:
- Learning music through a slower-paced rhythm game, by clicking notes as they descend, then using spells you’ve learned throughout your gameplay
- Visual presentation:
- Beautifully crafted
- Storytelling:
- Through scenes and conversations
- Adventure
- AI-less
- Casual
- Family Friendly
- Hand-drawn
- Short Playtime
- Singleplayer
- Supernatural
- Voice Acted – Partial
Pros:
- Almost fully voice acted
- Fun mini-games for spells
- Nice worldbuilding
- No stress on time
Cons:
- Some customizations not needed
- Some UI parts need work
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Explanation to Negative Feedback
Some customizations not needed
I like the fact that there are character customizations, but there are some portions of the customizations that I think just aren’t needed and are a little silly to implement.
Such as the nose and mouth shape, along with skin feature.
Your character model is so small, I just think these things will be overlooked on your character anyway. If we got close-ups of them throughout the game, then all right, but going through the skin features, several things I just couldn’t see. I didn’t know what the choices were showing me, so it seemed silly to implement them when it’s all so miniscule anyway.
Some UI parts need work
One of the main things is moving items from your inventory to you storage. You have to manually grab an item from one place and move it to the other place, instead of having a keybind to automatically place them in one place or another.
Something else that was a bit clunky is certain portions of the menu interface.
Such as with your spells. It took me a moment to figure out that I needed to move my cursor to the right in order to click on the scroll, to bring the full spell sheet up to play the tune. I played on controller, so maybe this would be easier to realize on mouse and keyboard, but…nothing really told me that’s where I needed to click.
Same as with some other things on the right section of the menu you chose. You have to move the cursor on that side to click things.
It just needs to have something to tell you that that’s there.
My last gripe is that the items you can throw in the well to earn money from doesn’t reveal how much money you’re getting from them. But they show how much you can sell them for in the inventory itself.
Explanation to Positive Feedback
Almost fully voice acted
I went into this demo not thinking that it’d be voice acted at all, but I was thoroughly surprised by the fact that most of it is fully vocalized. There was only one choice I clicked on that wasn’t voiced in my playthrough, and our character also isn’t voiced on whatever it is we say, but it’s all good.
Maybe my one concern with it being all voiced is that the lines continue on their own, instead of you needing to press a button to continue.
We don’t really know that until it happens and I think most people will accidentally skip dialogue if that’s the case.
Fun mini-games for spells
In order to cast spells properly, we need to learn the magical tune for them, so there’s something of a rhythm game going on. Except it’s not as intense as some of them are, thank goodness. I’d be terrible at learning spells otherwise.
It’s more like you have a music sheet with notes dropping down, and you have to press the corresponding button when they reach the designated area.
There’s also potion-brewing that has its own mini-game as well.
You take your ingredients and place them into cauldrons as fast as you can without any slip-ups, and have an extra bowl to put ingredients you don’t quite need at the moment. But you need to use those ingredients before the timer runs out or you’re docked points.
Hard to explain, but I really like what they’re doing on both mini-games.
Nice worldbuilding
The characters themselves will talk to you about certain places or events if you’ve unlocked the things to talk about, such as with the Silence. But then there’s the backstory of the intro, and the teachers who talk to you about certain aspects of the past.
I love learning lore in video games, and the lore in this game is pretty fascinating, what with the world once being silenced, and now everyone is sort of finding their voices and bringing music back.
No stress on time
There is a clock in the lower left so you know what time it is, and there are moments in the day where things are scheduled. While I don’t know what exactly happens if you go past the time of your scheduled events–or even if you can–the time does stop during specific scenes and once it hits a certain point in the evening.
There’s no passing out if you’re wasting time, and there’s no going from one day to another while you’re out roaming as far as I can tell from the time-stop implementation.
You can go to specific scheduled events earlier, in case you don’t want to wait for the exact time.