Birthdays The Beginning Review: Surprise Party

The oddly-named Birthdays the Beginning is all about celebrating new life in all its forms, from amorphous sea jellies to our own fragile race.

Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: NIS America
Platform: PC (Version reviewed), PS4
Release Date: May 9, 2017

Rarely does a god simulator embrace innocence in the way Birthdays the Beginning does, but it’s to be expected from the creators of Harvest Moon. This is no power trip about creating and destroying nations or shaping a world to your whims, though the latter is certainly a part of the game to a degree. Instead, Birthdays the Beginning is, true to its name, a celebration. It celebrates the beginnings of life, equally jubilant whether that life is a tiny ocean plant or an enormous dinosaur. And it succeeds in conveying this joy to the player in spite of the gameplay hurdles it hits along the way.

The campaign of Birthdays the Beginning is loosely tied together by the story of an unknown character who is drawn by family history to a cave and discovers the Cube, a barren planet upon which they can shape the land and water and, eventually, create life. The player’s guide, Navi, directs them as they alter the cube in finding appropriate conditions for life to flourish, with the end that if they can recreate human civilization, they can return home from the Cube. As the player progresses, the Cube grows larger, making room for more species, and new items become available to aid them in making more dramatic changes to the landscape.

The Cube is laid out as a grid in which you can raise or lower squares of the land. Lowering above or below certain thresholds results in mountains, lowlands, shallows, seas, and deep seas. You’ll gain the ability to move larger swatches of land at a time (always in squares) and also pick up items that can create mountains or valleys instantly, start freshwater rivers, flatten the land, change the temperature or moisture levels, or encourage life to reproduce or evolve. Once you’ve shaped the land to your liking, you can back out of the Cube and move time forward to see how the world reacts to what you’ve done.

The actual act of shaping the world of the Cube can be an absolute pain in the neck, largely because of the control layout. There’s no way to change the controls (at least on PC), and everything is mapped to unintuitive keys. For example, you raise and lower land with “.” and”,” and change the size of the area you want to move with “F” and “H.” The mouse can be used to move around and click on some things, but that results in accidentally raising and lowering land you don’t want to, and you can’t use the mouse to change the camera view if you want.

Those are just a few examples, but for a game with gameplay largely centered around shaping land, I found the actual act of shaping land to be frustrating in the extreme. Items improved the experience somewhat, but you don’t get vital pieces such as the Field Source (used to level the ground, all but necessary for fixing areas you’ve moved previously if you don’t want to spend 10 minutes on one mountain) until late in the campaign. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable to create different structures in the Cube–more that it was infuriating to alter existing ones. I generally found my frustrations were tempered in Free Play mode when I had all the tools I wanted right from the start.

Puttering about in the world against the odd control scheme rewards patient players, though. With or without Navi’s guidance, your goal is to create new life and progress evolution. Everything starts with Stromatolite and Cyclomedusa and evolves according to how you shape the world. Creatures will evolve under certain conditions that the game will hint at. If the environment grows too harsh for them, they may mutate and survive…or go extinct.

And that’s where the joy of Birthdays the Beginning comes into play. The game’s delight at each new species is easily shared by the player, who can zip into the world and collect them to learn more about them. Your cube suddenly populates itself with all manner of interesting flora and fauna, and you get to watch the surprisingly accurate chain of creatures morph from the tiniest jellyfish into complex organisms. You’ll discover surprise after surprise, such as bears mutating into pandas or a burst of butterflies sudden evolving and propagating, stuffing your world with color. It doesn’t hurt that all the dinosaurs and animals are really, really cute. Many of the more complex ones will exhibit interesting animations, too, such as eating or roaring.

There’s much to be learned in simply dropping the reigns and letting the game do what it does, then analyzing the results later.

The campaign mode’s gentle guidance provides a perfect introduction to the game that canvasses the broad scope of what your powers can do and shows you what’s possible. It can take around ten hours to complete, longer if you stray from the path or, like me, get stuck trying to evolve a fish. The strength of the game, in my opinion, is its Free Play and Challenge modes. Free Play mode revels in Navi’s absence. With all tools at your disposal from the start, you are free to create a world populated entirely by spiders, an endless ocean dotted with islands–whatever you like! All just to uncover what species would want to inhabit your strange new world.

Challenge Mode gives you an existing Cube with certain limitations on your Avatar, and asks you to birth a certain species in a certain number of years. It relies on your knowledge gained from the other two modes of how to create certain conditions, something you should be an apt hand at after the trial and error of Navi’s instruction. While not my favorite aspect of the game, Challenge Mode provided an focused break from the more freewheeling structure of the other two modes, and gave me a gauge to see how much time I had wasted in Free Play mode trying to make a dinosaur.

Birthdays the Beginning will not appeal to everyone. As a god sim game with frustrating controls, anyone who isn’t already interested in the genre will likely find the patience required to make things happen tedious and unrewarding. Genre veterans are likely to be forgiving enough to reap the game’s rewards. But there’s a third level where I think Birthdays the Beginning succeeds, and that’s as an educational tool.

While not everything is 100% scientifically accurate, certainly, every creature I encountered as I played was a real creature on this earth at some point, called by accurate scientific name and living in fairly approximate conditions as to when it appeared in the real world. Evolutionary trees seem relatively accurate. Sure, with some wiggling around, you can get dinosaurs and humans to co-exist in this game, but rather than use Birthdays the Beginning as a tool to specifically chart evolutionary lines, this provides a wonderful perspective on how evolution actually comes about.

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Temperature changes, altered environments, too many of one organism in the ecosystem, water levels, prey and predator relationships; all play into how the organisms in the game evolve and adapt. A mixture of logic, context clues, and experimentation is required to birth the organisms you want, but there’s much to be learned in simply dropping the reigns and letting the game do what it does, then analyzing the results later. I understood the basic concepts of evolution before picking up Birthdays the Beginning, but this game put them into context in a way that school textbooks never did. Give this game to kids and classrooms, and see how well their understanding evolves.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.