Happy Birthdays

Happy Birthdays (also known as Birthdays the Beginning on PS4 and PC) is a God Sandbox Simulation game similar to games like Lionhead Studio’s Black and White and Ubisoft’s From Dust. The game was developed by Harvest Moon creator Mr. Yasuhiro Wada with TOYBOX Inc. and Ark System Works. It was published by NIS America. The game is an updated port of the PS4 and PC game Birthdays the Beginning but the amount of coverage of what the actual differences are is very scarce to find online. Happy Birthdays released on the Nintendo Switch on the 8^th of June 2018 and Birthdays the Beginning released on the 9^th of May 2017 for PC and PS4.

tl;dr – rating: 6/10

Positives:

+ Brilliant world creation and editing

+ Tonnes of detail to the cube world such as Temp, Air Moisture, Depth, etc.

+ Creatures ‘playdough-like’ design makes them colourful and cute

+ Relaxing gameplay with lots of creativity

+ Avatar abilities make terraforming easier

Negatives:

– Weak story with locked species

– Creatures don’t really do much

– Not enough creature variety (Many are retextured models)

– Long complicated tutorial

— Not a lot of purpose to the game, not many missions or engaging game modes

Happy Birthdays is a bit of an odd one. You take on the role of a being of godly powers that can shape your little cube world. You can dig land or raise mountains and affect everything in the world from temperature to air moisture; the only thing out of your direct control is the creatures and plants that live on your cube. There are a few game modes that revolve around building and populating your world.

The story for the game is that you go through a hidden doorway to a secret world and are then trapped with the adorable (and slightly irksome) sprite called Navi. Navi then says that in order for you to return to your world you have to help them bring humans into existence through evolution. With that said you’re given a level to choose as your starting point and begin with very simple organisms close to plankton and other early vegetation. By enduring a long and painstakingly drawn out tutorial (that even Navi admits is a bit overwhelming) you’re then given the ability to terraform and shape your world. This then begins the story mission of creating Humans, the game gives you a few missions to point you in the right direction but ultimately this is all the story consists of save for a few short cut scenes. So if anything the story is one of this game’s major weaknesses, its flat, barely held together and doesn’t have much importance on the game.

Aside from the Story Mode, Happy Birthdays has two other modes: Free Mode and Challenge Mode. Challenge Mode tasks you with evolving certain species as quickly as you can such as T.Rex or Triceratops. It also possibly unlocks more challenges as you complete them as I have seen other challenges I didn’t have unlocked online though I haven’t played through all of my own yet. Free Mode is the best mode out of all of them because of the clever ability to bring your Story Mode world over to Free Mode meaning you don’t have to go through the whole process of getting your world back to the way it was. Free Mode also unlocks certain species that you can’t get in Story Mode (though this fact isn’t explained anywhere in the game) and meant that some rarer mythical species like the Yeti and the Sea Dragon unlocked for me after I ported my world across.

The world crafting is where this game really shines. The level of detail is amazing and you have full control of every 1×1 square on the map. Your cursor can also change size as you progress through the game. You can shrink down to 1×1 or expand your cursor to effect large areas at a time. Everything in your world has a cause and effect however so you have to be careful what you do to your world in case it causes a knock on effect such as changing the world’s temperature and accidentally causing a species to go extinct. It’s easy to see some of the correlations the game is trying to make about how tiny changes in an environment can have a big impact, something I’m sure they want to rub off on the player’s mentality for our own world. While the majority of the crafting is done in ‘micro’ mode in order for environmental changes to kick in you need to zoom out to ‘marco’ mode and let time continue ticking either in hundreds of years or thousands.

Your avatar has a wide array of powers that it can use to affect the creatures slightly, though it doesn’t have direct control over them. Some of the powers it can use include protecting a species from changes in the environment (like temperature change) but makes them sterile so the species can’t increase any more. You can also use seeds of mutation or evolution to force a change in a species, these changes can spawn all-new species like a T.Rex adapted to cold environments or a Triceratops that eats meat rather than plants.

You have other abilities too; some can be used to create pockets of temperature like increasing the temperature by thirty degrees in a 32×32 area. Other abilities can create mountains or valleys instantly or increase or decrease the air moisture in an area. All these abilities require star points which are generated when you alter the world in any way or when a particular species appears or its population spikes or falls. Some special creatures only appear after you’ve collected a certain amount of stars too…

So whilst creating a world is incredible versatile and satisfying it’s the creatures that really take the centre stage in Happy Birthdays. The aesthetic looks of all the creatures are happy little playdough-looking designs and they totter about in your world eating food and multiplying or decreasing in numbers. The problem is that other than that the creatures don’t really do anything else, so while it is great fun to find a creature in your species list, find out what requirements it needs to appear (such as temperature or depth level) and then fill those requirements, once you’ve actually got it to appear you can’t do that much more with it. Speaking of the species list, this tool is used to find habitat data on every species in the game. They are numbered within it but the numbers don’t really correlate to where it is on the spider-web design, so finding a single species can be an absolute nightmare if you don’t already know where it is.

The animations for the game are part of the problem. The creatures are animated, like I said before, to plod about and eat, even the eating is a little too simplistic however. A species that feeds on another for example won’t specifically hunt down their prey rather a comically oversized ‘meat-on-the-bone’ will appear in front of many meat-eating creatures and they’ll chomp down before moving about some more. The level of depth is unbalanced then, in some aspects the game has more creativity and flexibility than many other games like it, but this creativity is stunted with the actual creatures in the game and more often than not they’ll only end up being numbers on a screen to you rather than actual individuals that you’ll end up caring about. For example I was excited when I saw that Anomalocaris was in this game and when I finally made the conditions ‘just’ right to get one to appear I took to calling him Anthony. However Anthony didn’t last very long since three or four others spawned to represent the twenty-four hundred others that had spawned in the ideal conditions and with no way to distinguish between them he fell into obscurity. RIP Anthony.

And yet despite all of the things I wish were included in the game I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my time playing it. The game is oddly relaxing and peaceful and creating the ideal habitat for multiple species is very satisfying. It’s not the sort of game that stresses you out as you play it, on the contrary, it’s the fact that it’s so easy to pick up and play that I wish there was more content or more to do with the current content. The number of species whilst impressive isn’t really as much as I expected when I found out that the species don’t really do a lot, for example there aren’t many creatures from many other periods of time, no giant centipedes, no prehistoric coned squid, no giant sea scorpions and many of the creatures that are in the game are just reused models with different texture patterns splayed over them. It’s frustrating that they didn’t do more with the game because it has so much potential, even if you got to play as each species, find its food source and explore your created world through different eyes, the closest thing we get to that is a 1^st person view through our avatar though there isn’t a lot you can do and you’ll find yourself switching back to the top-down view very quickly.

My final thoughts on Happy Birthdays is this then. That in comparison to some of the gameplay I saw of Birthdays the Beginning it seems to have fixed some of the issues it had like overcomplicated controls and overlays. Happy Birthdays has a fairly simple control scheme but a few complex game mechanics. The amount of creativity it has far outshines other God Sandbox Simulators like From Dust and Black and White, but the one thing that they possessed that Happy Birthdays does not is a sense of purpose and development, you’d teach your animal in Black and White lessons and develop them over several missions and in From Dust your avatar would gain new powers to further shape the world. Happy Birthdays gives you everything from the get go but then leaves you standing atop your replica of London, watching the dinosaurs plod over your mountain-styled Big ben and swim in your replica Thames and, well, that would be it. You’d done it and you’d have to go find something else to do, sure you can attempt to ‘catch them all’ but even then the hollow satisfaction you’ll get coupled with the limited replayability means you’ll probably look back on it fondly but won’t pick up the game again in the same way I continually go back to those other games. Happy Birthdays is a journey and a fun one at that but it’ll leave you hungry for more, or wishing at what could be, though it will give you some adorable screenshots to look back on when you’ve completed it.

BcT Review Rating: 6/10

Reviewed on the Nintendo Switch