Birthdays the Beginning is my kind of life sim

Cue the Jurassic Park theme

I can appreciate that this game, Birthdays the Beginning, won’t be for everyone.

But as someone totally enamored with ecological simulations in which you watch over living organisms with a careful eye and raise the ecosystem into something more, something greater, I am stoked. It’s the type of video game design I daydream about and one I’m always hoping to see done right.

How do you build an environment suitable for snakes, monkeys, bears, dinosaurs, primitive humans, and a whole mess of other critters? I’m not so sure, but I’m excited to find out while playing as whatever the heck that little magical flying guy is. There are going to be casualties. That much is clear.

Now, I’m not suggesting this will be “the one,” by any means, but the game is being produced by Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada, and that counts for a lot in my book. Birthdays reads to me like a passion project, if for no other reason than its continued existence as a game with a very focused and surely limited appeal. Somehow, some way, it was greenlit and funded. In this climate, I’m thankful for that.

Toybox Inc. and Arc System Works are bringing Birthdays to PS4 in Japan this January and, as reported by Gematsu, it’s also coming to North America and Europe at an as-yet-unknown date.