Brighter Shores is cosy, quintessentially British, and extremely grindy. I got access to the closed beta quite late and still managed to put in more than ten hours catching fish, solving the game’s quite tricky opening quest puzzles, and falling in love with its quaint world. Considering I didn’t even know about this game two weeks ago, jumping into Andrew Gower’s new project – developed with a small team over the course of many years – has felt like walking into a time machine where I’ve got home from school to my large white PC and four snatched Hobnobs from the kitchen cupboard.
The game is immediately charming. Despite being an MMO on the surface, it first reminded me of the Monkey Island games, because there’s an innate silliness to the characters and world: Captain Binns, the garrison commander, Robin Nockwright, the aptly named archer trainer, and a ship docked at the port, named ‘Vincible’. Your character is a fledgling guard-in-training who is immediately tasked with defending the town from marauding goblins. You get your first bits of gear, defeat some angry crows, learn some magic, and then it’s time to start questing.
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Brighter Shores looks like the kind of game I need right now.
As someone who writes a lot of guides and walkthroughs for games, Brighter Shores has proven difficult. Two of the three starting quests involve puzzle-solving and I’m ashamed to admit I’ve fallen short of solving them. Admittedly, I’ve had a relatively short amount of time with the game, and Brighter Shores feels like the sort of experience that is meant to take up many, many hours of your life. Despite its linear world exploration – the map is divided into rooms rather than an open world – there’s still a great sense of discovery. There are locked doors, hidden symbols, and different dialogue options with important NPCs depending on the clothes you’re wearing aplenty. The game is sort of like a point-and-click adventure of old but with some of the MMO trappings of RuneScape.
While Captain Binns informs me that learning how to fight is an important part of becoming a guard, to become the best version of myself I should also hone my other skills. Grinding professions is a core part of the game, so much so that the starting quests require you to hit certain thresholds. One character wants me to cook them a soup before they give me some important information, but to cook that soup I need to be a level 61 chef. I spent around two hours levelling my chef skill – making omelettes, bacon sandwiches, jellied eel – and got to level 15. Another part of the same quest requires me to catch an ugly fish from an overgrown pond, but I can’t catch that fish until I’m level 25 in fishing. At a risk of repeating myself, I spent two hours fishing and got to level 14.
Did I enjoy the process? Well, yes. Cooking is therapeutic. To make jellied eel I can either purchase the eels from the fishmonger or catch them myself. I secure gelatin from the ingredient trader. I need to boil eel with the gelatin in a pot in the kitchen of ‘The Delicious Dab’ restaurant and then freeze the homogenous blob of fat and eel in an icebox. If the name of the restaurant is anything to go by, I have a feeling this repetitive and cosy experience is probably enjoyable under the influence of a certain flowering plant.
When you grow tired of spearing eels in the stream outside of town, you can go and beat up a variety of enemies. I spent a good hour or so just thumping thieves in an alleyway, scooping up their dropped weapons and armour to sell at the Quartermaster. Combat is fairly simple with little input required from you, but I can imagine that the rock-paper-scissors elements of the damage types, more interesting weapons and spells once you unlock one of the class specifications, and any sort of boss fights that might appear in later chapters of the game might make the combat more interesting.
Brighter Shores has an ‘episodic’ formula, as each new area unlocks in the form of an episode of storytelling and world-building. I’ve played for over ten hours and I haven’t left the starting town. In my first impressions piece, I wrote about how the game reminded me of ‘choose your own adventure books’ where you unlock new areas bit-by-bit, making decisions as you go, slowly discovering and piecing together information about the world. Having now played the game, that’s exactly what it feels like. There are four episodes in Brighter Shores at launch, with more to come down the line according to Fen Research, the studio behind the game.
In terms of monetisation, Brighter Shores also keeps it old school with a freemium model. The game is free-to-play, but with a premium monthly subscription you get access to more features and chapters of the game. This means you can try the game out and then decide if you want to go any further. It’s a simple, non-predatory system with no extra microtransactions, premium currencies, or dreaded ‘pay-to-win.’
Overall, this is the sort of quiet game that certainly won’t be for everyone. It’s slow, and grindy, and not particularly flashy. But for those who’ve ever enjoyed RuneScape then I see Brighter Shores as a no-brainer. If, like me, you enjoy fishing for several hours on a virtual beach, welcome home to Brighter Shores.
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