Songs of Glimmerwick launches as a music-based magic school RPG from Eastshade Studios

Eastshade Studios, the team behind the first-person painting game Eastshade, has launched Songs of Glimmerwick, a magic school RPG that reimagines spellcasting as musical performance.

In Songs of Glimmerwick, magic is music. Players cast spells by playing note sequences on the keyboard in an Ocarina of Time-style minigame. The spells serve practical purposes: songs make gardening tools operate themselves, cause fish to leap into nets, and make undergrowth retreat to reveal paths. The game is not combat-focused.

The gameplay loop combines multiple activities. Players attend daily lessons, brew potions by gathering stems, shells, mushrooms, and flints from an autumnal island, and explore a university garden with beehives and sunflowers alongside a central village with waterways and quest-givers. The demo indicates players need not worry about time pressure during their schooling.

The game features fully voice-acted dialogue and an orchestral score. The art style evokes a pop-up book read by torchlight, with mobile environmental details like passing cloud shadows. Character faces are described as somewhat muted and non-descript.

Eastshade Studios published development logs discussing the game's budget and the creative reasoning behind the shift from their first-person Eastshade to this top-down RPG format. Songs of Glimmerwick is now available.