Birthdays the Beginning Review

Player(s): 1
Platforms: Playstation 4

From Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada comes Birthdays the Beginning, a sandbox style game that relies on evolution and experimentation. Birthdays the Beginning has you start off with a cube that is in your control as you shape a world where humans and dinosaurs can possibly co-exist. Any action you do can create an entire species or drive it to extinction.

The game itself is pretty fun and the premise is nice and simple. Raise or lower terrain to birth life and that's really it. You can create massive expanses of water at certain cost and gain, or deserts about the same way, or vast mountains where rivers flow through. Your tools are items collected in the field such as seeds, recovery leaves, and so forth.

After you start, you are introduced to your guide Navi who is some sort of "unknown" to guide you through the game.

Does the name Navi sound familiar coupled with the sound the text boxes make after reading them? I remember a certain elf-boy who had a fairy companion.. Anyways..

It starts off with a quick tutorial. Very slow-paced quick tutorial. What I mean, is it feels long and drawn out and you wish it just cut straight to the game. Come to find out, you need it. There is no help menu for if you don't get what to do the first time around. So, like a true gamer, I just forced extinction on all my plants and what very little animals birthed and started a new game. I re-did the whole tutorial to make certain I didn't miss anything. Even then I got confused. It's so simple, all you do is raise and lower terrain. You have to do this multiple times on a mass scale for it to really impact anything significant. It was confusing at first, but I started really learning. That's what this game tries to do too, make you learn.

This is a very kid-friendly title with the same concept worked to the graphic design. They are not the best looking models, but they are colorful and cute and I like that. You have a clean palette to work with here, not being so confused at which animals are which, even if some are just re-skinned.

You start with nothing, but as you start to learn how different species work with the environment, it becomes a personal mission. You go about capturing each unknown birthed creature and they wind up in the library in the menu. There is no real story, just you trying to birth life. You have HP that you use for every action in changing the environment, but later on you won't find this a hindrance at all due to the max amount gained every level. Refill it by zooming out to Macro mode and starting time. Your reflections on the cube only take shape once you do that.

Navi himself is only there to tell you what you need to do, and gives no tips. Something Navi should be more helpful in, but isn't, essentially at the beginning.

From what I can tell there are only 4 episodes, but there are also 10 challenges you can do after you finished those. Challenges are given to you after you reached certain points in the main game. They help add to the content, but at the same time feel a little easy or just light.

The music is relaxing, but gets repetitive fast since it goes in a consistent loop. I just put on my own music or something since throughout the game you don't really need to hear anything to enjoy it.

Lack of content is really what I was disappointed in. With only 292 species, with many only color variations (as I'm aware evolution produces), I expected a lot more. The challenges are a nice touch, but it's a small extra. When you look at the info of each creature, it would have benefited by being able to rotate character models. I don't want to have to try to follow a Pteranodon to look as closely as possible at the character model. Also, would have been a nice feature to at least share your cubes over PS4. Not needed, but would have been nice features. There is also a lack of controller setup, which would have helped after the tutorial Episode.

Some replay value, but it's just not there to justify a second playthrough unless you want the trophies or really just want to create a perfect world. It's good, but not enough to keep me coming back for more. If much more content is added later, I would likely give this a solid buy. At the moment, it is a solid game to check out.

Overall it's fun and slightly above average. I love games where I can just sit back and create things. Only the lack of content and a more varied music score drag it down.

-JT

Birthdays the Beginning is available May 9th for the Playstation 4 in both physical and digital formats.

---

GRAPHICS: GREAT
SOUND: GOOD
GAMEPLAY: GREAT
VALUE: QUESTIONABLE

OVERALL: GOOD

---

FULL DISCLOSURE: This game was provided to A-to-J Connections free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of review