By Kotaku | Created at 2026-09-30 14:37:35 | Updated at 2026-09-30 21:53:08
7 hours ago
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!
© Eastshade StudiosGlimmerwick‘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.
© Eastshade StudiosConversely, 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, especially with everyone in near-identical uniforms. I like the fish guy who’s living on land for extended periods for the first time and is very enthused by kimchi. My roommate sucks, she blew up the fireplace on the first day and expects me to solve that for her.
I am enjoying the pacing of Songs of Glimmerwick, which feels remarkably like I imagine college must have felt to people who didn’t take a completely overfull course load like I did, but with the additional laxity you might imagine at a sleepy, gentle magic university. On a given day, I might have a class, or not; it’s never quite clear until a letter arrives telling me when to show up. In between classes, I have occasional social engagements, as well as a job: I tend the campus garden. It was an absolute disaster when I first showed up, but with the aid of the aforementioned spells I learned, it’s slowly looking a bit nicer. I’m growing basil and marjoram, several kinds of flowers, and in the pond, cranberries. I sell a lot of this, but much of it goes to potion ingredients as well, because everyone in town and in the school is always asking me for potions for something or another.
© Eastshade StudiosGlimmerwick‘s time and plot determinedly marches on as the calendar pages flip, but the game also leaves you with complete freedom to structure the in-between hours. The clock will always freeze and wait for me to arrive at class, so I’ll never miss a lecture. Some mornings I wake up and some jackass has filled the halls with cryptic, cultish pamphlets about how we should all burn the forest down. These things happen whether I grow the garden, explore, engage with the town, or just stand around and sleep all day. I like that no one ever has big clonky quest markers on their heads in Glimmerwick, serving as an endless task list to be checked off. If I talk to people, they may or may not tell me something interesting, and they may or may not ask me to do something for them. My experience of Glimmerwick‘s classes and its main story appears to be locked in, but my experience of the rest of it is entirely dependent on when, where, and how I engage with the world. In this way, it reminds me of Eastshade.
© Eastshade StudiosSo that narrative I opened with of how my days in Glimmerwick are going right now? All of that I just sort of…figured out and discovered on my own. My classmate’s potion was part of the main story, but all the rest I stumbled into by talking to people, looking at what was in the shops, trying to figure out how to bypass the grouchy sapient bush to the south of town, and experimenting. There was no tutorial that told me to go find this stuff, no deadline for doing it. Could’ve skipped it and just fished all day. You may or may not prioritize your time and attention differently.
Maybe some will see this and worry that this is a recipe to missing out on things. I don’t actually know if it’s possible to reach the “end” of Glimmerwick and have the clock run out on your time at the school without you having experienced everything. But without those noisy quest markers and arrows and constant tutorial reminders about what I’m missing, I find that I care about it all a lot less. I’m happy to tend my garden, learn my little music spells, and if there’s time at the end of the day, see what’s new in town or go fishing. Glimmerwick‘s main character just escaped a rigid, closed-off society alone and friendless, and washed up at magic school. Let her wander around the forest playing flute and picking mushrooms, if that’s what she wants to do with herself.
