Birthdays the Beginning Review

Good Stock:

“Birthdays the Beginning” has a rich lineage, coming from the original mind behind Harvest Moon and ARC System Works, the studio who make some unbelievably beautiful games. But does a solid bloodline ensure a good game? Read on to find out.

Story:

Birthdays is a game whose entire narrative could be viewed in a few minutes, despite the focus of the title being the evolution of life on our planet – a story that spans billions of years. Whilst in the game you’ll be treated to watching these endless years rage on, the actual ‘storyline’ is a couple of incredibly simple art cards accompanied with some text that bookend each of the game’s four chapters.

It’s a story about your player character stumbling onto a little alien dude who wants to show you the mystery of evolution and unlock the secrets of the past. And then some Dinosaurs show up. It’s… weird.

Gameplay:

But it isn’t about the story: as I’ve said, the interesting ‘narrative’ that comes from Birthdays is the wholly unique, often questionably slow pacing of the birth of our planet. You see, Birthdays is a game quite unlike any other. You are quickly put in charge of a square of flat, grey barren land – which represents Earth – and told to re-enact the history of our home. From tiny microrganisms birthed in oceans, to Dinosaurs stomping around grassy plateaus, all the way until Mankind claim it for their own. My personal endgame was getting a T-Rex but that happens so early on (relative to, you know, the entirety of evolution) that the game isn’t happy to end it there and forced me to go through all the boring animals until monkeys turned into slightly less hairy monkeys that would go on to develop nuclear bombs.

Birthdays is a sandbox simulation, and its most easily understood as a God sim with very limited powers. Your main abilities – the entire toolset used throughout this fairly lengthy title – is reduced to raising and lowering land. That’s it. With these two simple commands, you can create mountains or oceans, and by doing this you can affect the temperature of the entire square. Certain temperatures will force organisms to evolve or bring about entirely new animals or plantlife. Some of these evolutions require X amount of Y species to already inhabit the planet, but really, at its core, you do a bit of landscaping, zoom out and push fast forward on the clock. And watch life happen, I guess.

There’s a strange charm here, and a definite state of zen, should you get into Birthdays’ very particular groove. The entire effect isn’t unlike gardening: soon your square expands and you can cultivate your own tiny planet, with an ecosystem of your choosing and a design you can get fairly particular with. All with those two simple controls – raising and lowering land on a grid based system – and that simplicity is arguably a thing of beauty in itself. You can get items throughout the game to use, ones that force creatures to evolve or set a temperature regardless of your geological landscape, but even the game considers these ‘cheat’ items, and scores you poorly for using them, so I never did.

There’s a leisurely pace that some will find soothing, others a little tiresome. I fell into the latter camp, sadly, and I quickly grew pretty bored with the Birthdays. Whilst speeding through thousands of years a second and watching species snap into existence and go extinct in the same breath might be true to the history of our planet (at hyperspeed), it doesn’t make for a very good “game”.