REVIEW

Birthdays the Beginning Review

by Rob Pritchard, May 19th, 2017

From the beginnings of civilisation, we have all wondered about how our universe came to be. While some take the scientific approach, others believe it is the result of the intervention of a deity beyond our understanding. Whichever scenario you believe to be true, many popular works have tried to give us a way to imagine the experience of creation. Birthdays the Beginning is the latest video game to use this concept as a starting point, and while it does have some interesting ideas, there are a number of flaws which hold it back from being a universally enjoyable experience.

Unlike many simulation games of this nature, the game begins with a visual novel cut scene of you wandering through an unknown wilderness. After stumbling into a dark hole, you end up in control of a mysterious glass cube. The insides of this structure are completely blank, and for reasons unknown, you are instructed to create a fully functioning ecosystem by a mysterious spaceman-like creature named Navi. While the story has little bearing on the creative aspects of the game, it is interesting to see a simulation game of this nature have an accompanying narrative.

The core game play of Birthdays the Beginning is centred around using various items and tools to build a garden in which many kinds of species may thrive. Many modern gamers may think this is similar to products such as Harvest Moon, which is slightly coincidental as this game was designed by the original creator of the franchise. In fact, Birthdays the Beginning is closer to two other god simulation games such as Populus the Beginning and Black & White, where you have control over the environment, but none over any of the inhabitants of your created universe.

Right at the beginning, you use a literal soup of life to create the conditions for evolution, and then you must alter many environmental factors such as temperature and height of the land to create conditions for life to emerge from your blank canvas. In order to create your new world, you will need to use two separate modes. The micro mode is where you alter the physical composition of the garden, and the macro mode is where you wind time forward to see the fruits of your labours grow before your eyes. This is certainly a welcome conclusion as waiting hundreds of years for something to change would be impractical to say the least.

In order to get the more advanced species, you will have to rely on the process of evolution. To do this, you will either need to build the appropriate conditions as mentioned before, or use the Seeds of Evolution or Mutation that are spawned when new species are born into your universe. By capturing a sample of the species as they emerge, you will learn the exact conditions needed to create them in the future, which is highly helpful when you are trying to manage several different kinds of plants and animals at the same time. This process is interesting, but the way in which the process is played out without any humour or emotional connection sadly drains it of any entertainment value it was trying to create.

In case you don’t have a degree in microbiology, Navi is there to with a helpful story driven tutorial to aid you in your Darwin-esque endeavours. These assisted gameplay sections are split into episodes, each with several missions for you to complete. It was during one of these missions that I came across one of the games deepest flaws. If you happen to make a mistake, i.e. letting several of your species go extinct, it is exceedingly hard to spawn the necessary items you would require in order to recreate them. I understand that the developers were trying to go for scientific realism, but unfortunately this concept does not work well within the realms of a videogame.

The graphical style of Birthdays the Beginning is an interesting one. The promotional artwork for the game suggests that features a cutesy claymation styled environment, but in truth you are presented with a smooth shaded look for both the game world, and its flora and fauna. There is a limited soundtrack in the game, consisting of several soft sounding tracks that you might expect in a sandbox simulation experience. Although these pieces of music suited the tone of Birthdays the Beginning perfectly, it would have been nice to hear more variety in the musical accompaniments, rather than repeating the same three or four tracks ad nauseam.

Overall, Birthdays the Beginning is a brave experiment that functions well enough, but it feels like it is lacking the depth and personality offered by similar games of its genre. If you are looking for a semi-serious simulation that offers something different, then this game is definitely worth a look, even if you don’t stay for the entirety of the experience.