I was a bit mean to Brighter Shores in my MMO roundup, so you know what? I'm going to give it another try. I have this thing I do sometimes where I start a timer and give a game 22 minutes just to see if it's worth playing. Why 22? I don't know. It's a round number and less than a half hour. You might think that's not enough, but I really don't buy into the idea that you need to give a game hours and hours before it finally clicks. You can tell a lot just from the first few minutes.
Anyway, my first time with Brighter Shores was with my friends on November 14, 2024, and I only vaguely remember it. I played for exactly 63 minutes. Movement was tile based? And you could cook and maybe fight. Do quests. But it didn't grab me at all, and then I read about how, as you move through areas, skills you level up in previous areas become useless. And that, friends, is very weird.
The game is made by Andrew Gower, who was the lead developer of Runescape, so Brighter Shores is I guess meant to be another grind game, where the whole point is to grind out skills and level up and so on. Unfortunately, it stumbled right out of the gate, and a lot of people were left wondering what exactly its future looks like. For context, Brighter Shores has an all-time peak of 17,084 players on Steam, and now a pretty consistent trend of maybe daily peaks of 200. This is just a bit under Sonic Rumble's average of around 288 (and falling).
But let's see how it goes.
Oof. Oof oof. I can't say I hate Brighter Shores, but it has some major problems. First, the good: It runs well, and everything feels pretty okay. When I first logged in, I saw their roadmap, and I guess since I last played they added leaderboards, player trading, and more sidequests. Also they "divided professions into distinct milestones," whatever that means. Their latest update was on March 23, just a couple days ago, called Stonemason Bounties. And I guess those are...blobs that craft weapons by puking them up or something. They eat rocks.
So, most of my 22 minutes was just getting reacquainted. When I logged in, it basically seemed almost identical to what I remembered from a year or so ago. I found a pufferfish and a cabbage in my inventory. You have to open chat with Tab, and also go through a whole age-gated privacy thing to even turn on the ability to chat or add friends (they just ask for a birthday). I explored the town a bit after fading in on my character just hanging out at a beach where silver crabs listlessly wander. The first hiccup? If you're not high level enough, you cannot attack those crabs.
That felt weird, but fine. At least I could sit down in chairs and benches. I looked at my quest journal and decided to continue the main quest, which took me back to the training ground, where I needed to talk to Robyn Nockright and complete my bow training. The only problem? I needed to be combat level 15 to do that. So I wandered around looking for something I could actually fight, which led me (eventually, after running all around town again) about five steps away from Robyn to a little sparring area where I guess you're meant to repetitively fight infinitely respawning guard NPCs until you're combat level 15, then walk five steps back over to Robyn to do your bow training. I decided not to do that.
Combat is very simple. It's essentially Runescape auto combat. I guess you can get potions and stuff, but I'm not sure you need it. Health resets after every fight. Another fun thing, though, is that not only can you not fight certain enemies unless you're high enough level, sometimes you can't fight certain enemies if you haven't reached a "combat milestone" (whatever that is) and chosen a specific pack? I really don't know.
There's nothing more immersive than being told to unlock a foe after clicking on it.
So, my 22 minutes with Brighter Shores involved running around, being told I can't do pretty much everything I tried to do, dying a couple times in back alleys, and finally just fighting a few sparring guards and calling it a day.
I'm a little confused about why I'd play this vs. Runescape, if I were to choose a game to grind forever. It's not even the gameplay that puts me off. It's that very restrictive feeling of seeing an enemy but being told you can't fight it, or all these things about milestones or how chat is just strangely obtuse. It has a lot of barriers put up for no real reason, and the game design overall feels very strange. If they opened it up a bit, let you fight that crab and fail horribly, maybe it'd be better. But probably not.
In conclusion, I'd give Brighter Shores 1 out of 5 cabbages. I MIGHT poke at it some more just out of curiosity, and because it's actively being developed so you never know, but overall I wouldn't recommend it.
Space Channel Rabbit OUT.