A Joyful Genesis of Your Creation: Happy Birthdays Review

Player(s): 1
Platform(s): Nintendo Switch

Happy Birthdays is an interesting mix between the core concepts of Viva Piñata and Minecraft. Originally released on the PlayStation 4 and PC, the Switch version gets all the DLC along with some slight improvements to the game, making it the definitive edition.

The four starting environments.

The general idea of Happy Birthdays is to mold the terrain to your liking, raising or lowering the land and balancing the water content. Once you set things how you want them to be, paying close attention to the temperature and moisture, you simply watch as time flows, allowing for the world to evolve. If this sounds rather simple for a simulator game, that’s because it is. That’s not necessarily a knock on the game, since simplicity can be welcome, but the problem is that simplicity here leads to a lack of motivation beyond collecting everything you can find.

At least the story has pretty pictures?

There are 4 themed ‘cubes’ to select from, with different base factors in the environment to allow you to shape it how you want. Upon first booting, the game will guide you into the green cube (aka the beginner mode). A brief story is told to the player in order to set the mood, and then you’re thrown in with some instructions on how to play and with the basic goal of trying to birth a specific type of creature. Your odd cube-like partner gives you a set of criteria needed to birth your next goal, and leaves the rest up to you, occasionally interrupting to offer gameplay tips. The ultimate goal of each of the 4 cubes is to give birth to modern humans. Once you reach this goal, you are presented with an ending to the story and the credits roll. It’s at this point that I realized that the story was merely a waste of space, and was so basic that it seemed like the developers wasted time putting that in over expanding the features of the game. After the credits roll, you are welcome to jump back into your save and continue playing on that map to your heart’s content, watching civilization grow (or deplete, depending on how you shape the world). Doing this is better saved for Free Mode though, where you aren’t guided straight to success.

Not as annoying as a certain other Navi we know.

The game does a great job of giving you the basics of what’s needed to birth life, and how to control the game. It seems daunting at first, but I’ve found myself doing a plethora of things fairly quickly. Unfortunately, despite the concepts being easy to understand, the actual layout of the controls can be quite clunky, leading to some frustrating moments. This seems contradictory, but the way you control the world is great, while the layout of the buttons is not. It’s not a game breaker, but a game like this could have benefited greatly from having the option to customize your controls more than just axis changes and the like. On the bright side, you can use the touch screen to select some stuff on your display, giving you a little flexibility.

To make things a little more interesting, you’re given the ability to collect life forms into a sort of encyclopedia, giving a goal to work towards for collectors. As you do various things throughout the game you can unlock monuments to place, which are fun little items that serve no purpose beyond adding some flair to the world. You also have a set of skills you can use to make shaping the world easier (such as making a species more fertile or creating a mountain on the fly).  I’m not sure how these skills were handled in the original version since I didn’t play it, but it’s touted as a new feature to the Switch version. More than giving you access to easy ways to attain your goal, it gives you interesting and streamlined ways to manipulate your world, helping to bypass some of the monotony that can come with trying to do things with only the basic terrain changing tool.

It can look quite nice when populated with plants.

Unfortunately, that’s where the interest starts to fail. After going through 2.5 of the 4 story cubes, I realized that the overall process is almost identical. The initial start might be different in order to get the ball rolling, but then you find yourself going through the same routine to get to the credits. Admittedly, the process is designed to be longer, since a lot of the middle tasks are removed in the beginner cube, but that doesn’t change the overall process. I didn’t feel motivated to finish the 3rd or 4th cubes as a result of this. For reference, it took me 6-8 hours to complete the first two cubes. Most of the fun is to be had in Free Mode, once you realize that the ‘Story’ mode is an absolute sham. Free Mode allows you to approach your world building in your own way, lending itself far better to the type of game this is. It’s unfortunate though, since I always enjoy guided stories in games like these.

There is a first-person mode strictly for viewing.

One mode I was grateful for was the Challenge Mode. Here, you’re given a specific goal with some limits, forcing you to be creative in how you solve the problem. They start off pretty easy, but as you progress they can require some crafty manipulations in order to succeed. In the end though, even this mode started to feel painfully repetitive to me after I did about half the challenges. Between the 4 story cubes, the challenges and all the collectibles you can easily find yourself spending over 30 hours on this game.

One of the many creatures you can capture in your encyclopedia.

Thankfully, the game is cute, with very vibrantly designed creatures and plants mixed with a blocky Minecraft-esque design for the land itself. It’s an interesting mesh that works well. Unfortunately, due to the lack of any real interaction that the life forms will have with each other, you’ll often find yourself focusing on the terrain and speeding up time without really paying attention to the critters. The interactions are so bad, that instead of hunting, carnivores will just have a slab of meat magically appear in front of them and they’ll eat that. Part of this is due to the game design, since each critter you see represents a portion of the entire population of that particular creature. It’d be odd to have one eat another, when that other could represent a ton of creatures. Essentially, these items you see on the screen are merely avatars for groups of life forms. To add to the diminishing aesthetic is the absolutely atrocious sound design. Not that it sounds bad, but just that it sounds generic and is lacking any real variety. The music is calming to be sure, but also is very repetitive and has resulted in me muting the game in the latter half of my time with the game, opting to listen to some jams on my iPod instead. That is saying a lot, because I’m one of those gamers who almost always play with the volume up, finding the music and sound effects to be an important part of the experience.

You get milestone bonuses.

Happy Birthdays is an interesting game that can be fun when you want to relax. It’s a mixture of some neat concepts whose focus on terrain control is a bit different for the genre. Yasuhiro Wada’s (creator of Harvest Moon) style of complexity through simplicity definitely shows here. Unfortunately, the game reminds me a lot of Spore, in that it has a lot of neat ideas but doesn’t really properly flesh out anything, making the game feel like a shell of what it could be. There aren’t a lot of games like it though, and at $39.99 it can be worth the price if you are craving such an experience. I personally felt like a $29.99 tag would be more appropriate, and despite my complaints about the lack of depth, I still enjoyed my time in the game. Take that as you will, though there is a demo available for download. If you would like a different perspective, you can check out our review of the PS4 version here. Happy Birthdays will be available physically and digitally for the Nintendo Switch on June 5.

- Teepu

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Graphics: B
Sound: C-
Gameplay: C
Value: C+

OVERALL: C

Pros:

+ A novel approach to world building simulation makes you approach things uniquely.
+ Lots of life forms to birth and collect.
+ Being able to save at any moment lends itself to the portability of the Switch.

Cons:

- Story mode is lackluster and repetitive.
- Lack of depth makes the game feel like a chore sooner rather than later.
- It underutilizes the cute aesthetic.

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Disclaimer: This game was provided to us by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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