Don’t be fooled by the cute bunny ears and the nostalgic, fuzzy Gameboy art style. Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories is not a frothy and fun little adventure. The clue is in the ‘Bittersweet’ of the title: this is a kitten with claws.
You play as Honeydew (although you can change your name to something ruder if you fancy), who has a desk job at a melon soda factory. You also live at the factory, which isn’t great for work-life-balance. But your days are brightened by your best friend Cantaloupe, who works at a desk nearby. Together, you can just about put up with the corporate nonsense.
That is until Cantaloupe goes missing. You’re supposed to bunk off work with him and visit the local resort town of Hog Town, but he’s not there to greet you. So, you’re left walking the streets, finding evidence of where he might have gone. Wherever it is, it’s not looking like he went there of his own volition. There’s evidence of corporate influence, a gang of ne’er-do-wells, and even a Cheese Cult.
Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories is primarily a mystery. Finding Cantaloupe forms the lion’s share of the objective, and you will be completing side quests of the fetch variety to gather scraps of evidence. Slowly, it becomes clear that Cantaloupe is wrapped up in something bigger, and you get drawn along with him.
There’s nothing revelatory about the story in Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories, but that’s okay. You can probably guess who the big bads are from the short synopsis we’ve given. Instead, we found ourselves half-forgetting that the bigger plot existed, because it’s the smaller stories that make Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories juicy.
The best of these surround the Cavity Crew, the local gang who you get involved with. They might pretend that they’re threatening but they’re adorable, and we would happily have spent the entire time hanging out with them and kind of, but not really, committing crimes. The leader is a washed up singer who just wants another chance at the big time, while a snake and mouse keep making eyes at each other. But the best is an over-eager ghost who can’t convince the gang to fully accept them, so they send it out on impossible fetch-quests that make you wonder – just a little – that maybe they’re doing the same to you.
Everyone in Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories has main-character-syndrome and it’s what makes it sing. We get the sense that we’re a sidekick to all of them, as we retrieve their violins from overbearing critics, sabotage an open air concert for them, and reunite them with their long-lost parents. This isn’t a hero’s journey by any means: you’re going to have to get used to passing the heroism to others, instead being the maid, messenger and handyperson.
It’s the most divisive part of Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories, we suspect. It’s not a game that gets places directly, and you’re going to need to do some meandering makework to reach your destination. That comes in the form of fetch quests, and those fetch quests are rarely anything more than travelling to one person after another.
Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories is not interested in gameplay beyond walking about and talking to people. There are no minigames to play, no puzzles to solve, no combat to chew through or even many screens to explore. The challenge comes from knowing who will be able to help you at a given moment. Think of Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories as a massive green and black rolodex, where each problem needs to be resolved by considering who is best suited for the task. You will find something or someone that is the key to the problem, and then insert it into the lock.
The lack of gameplay is going to be disturbing for a few people. It reminded us of the item-swapping sequence in Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, with the added bonus of also looking like a Gameboy game. If you enjoyed the process of solving villager’s problems by chatting to people and swapping goods, then you’re in the right place. We were never privileged enough to play it, but we hear Earthbound shares similarities too.
It’s the way that Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories handles its play-space that we love the most. The towns and villages just feel so alive. Complete a task, and when you return to the police stations, parks and slums of the game map, there might be completely new people in the area with tasks to be solved. While Hog Town isn’t huge, the constant churn of people makes miraculous use of the space. We adored travelling through the town, over and over again, just to see who was out and about.
It’s all lubricated by some shrewd, charming writing. It may not reach the clever, inventive peaks of an Undertale, or deliver the warmth of Night in the Woods, but it’s a close cousin. A good example of the tone you can expect is the melons of the title: in Hog Town, melons are basically marijuana. They’re outlawed, but there are campaigners for legalising them, and politicians use the humble melon as touch-paper to stoke division and win elections. When you visit the slums, there are poor people in the back alleys nibbling on melons, desperate for you not to snitch them out.
That humour burns brightest in the characters, and they’re the ones that will stick with us the longest. Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories has a fantastic ability to conjure up eccentric characters and put them in the way of your larger objective. You want to get past? You’ll have to act as their servants, completing fetch quests that are a glorious distraction.Â
Which is a good summary for Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories. It’s a glorious distraction, and while it might not come with supposed necessities like gameplay and difficulty, it managed to keep us glued to our controller for a solid five hours. We implore you to feed your melon addiction and give it a go.
You can buy Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories from the Xbox Store
