Alba: A Wildlife Adventure

100%ed in about 3 hours. If you've played Beyond Good and Evil, this game is basically the photography sidequests in that, but as a whole game. I love collectathons and greatly enjoyed this, neat education wise too. Cute and wholesome with a pleasant art style and a real small-town feel. Very relaxing game to play, without being boring. The description provided by the devs is very honest and accurate. If you like animals, open worlds that aren't excessively large and barren, collectathons and a chill atmosphere, you will likely enjoy this game. Given it's only 3 hours to 100% though, depending on where you live it (regional pricing) might be worth waiting for a sale (full price is $24 AUD, I got it on sale for around $10ish and was satisfied). Taking away a star for the following reasons: -Lack of music hurts the atmosphere a bit. I can tell it's a stylistic choice but not all stylistic choices are good ones. -Movement speed is slow, this game needs a run button -Framerate isn't particularly stable, especially when taking photos, and there are no framerate options -Some jank here and there, particularly with the camera. In some areas it clips inside objects and causes weird rendering issues. After the game is beat, some NPCs are clipped inside each other and otherwise positioned strangely. Also saw a barn owl standing on nothing. -Bit of a nitpick but the diversity is a little lacking re: animal types. It's like 90% birds, the rest are basically all mammals. There is exactly one lizard in the game, and that makes me sad, as I love lizards.

Alba is a charming, relaxing feel good experience where you play as a young girl determined to save the wildlife preserve near her grandparents' home. For enjoyable, soothing process-oriented gameplay, Alba is really satisfying. You birdwatch, you pick up litter, you chat with locals, you try to solve gentle puzzles, and all in a gorgeous and playfull artsy world. It's not a game; it's a heart massage. The only downside to Alba is that its underlying message is a bit of a one-dimensional reminder that corporations ruining our wildlife areas are bad. The characters are hardly surprising or inspiring in this way. But if you appreciate that this was clearly made for younger children, then it's easy to set aside the drama and just enjoy the fun, sweet tasks the journey presents.

I do wildlife photography in my spare time, so of course I loved this game. It has a nice mix of common and rarer animals, and the bird calls I recognized were accurate. I found myself getting excited when I recognized some of them, like the Hoopoe or the Bee-Eaters right outside Alba's grandparents' house. I'm always happy to observe them, even in a game. Gameplay-wise, using the phone app is easy and intuitive. Photographing birds got a lot easier once I realized there was a zoom function on the phone. Birds in flight are more of a challenge (just like in actual photography!), but for most of them you can find one perched somewhere at some point in the game if you look carefully. There were some glitches, like someone looking through binoculars straight at a wall, but nothing game-breaking. This game can be played alongside a young child to teach them about birds, but it can also be enjoyed by adults looking for a relaxing experience. My ten-year-old self would have loved to explore the island, but even as an adult I would happily spend a few days there and come back with some good pictures.

I love this game. Played with my little child and my wife it becomes and a perfect experience for family times. Beautiful, well crafted with lovely characters and little histories to find around. It keeps the atmosphere of catalan coast town as it is, and with little enjoyable references everywere. Pretty fun! Well done! *I want to put it here an observation: The spanish translators has took some free licenses. In some cases (three or four times) the language is suprisingly rude and inappropiate, it doesn't feet well with rest of the work.

This games presentation is very good. It reminded me of pokemon snap but pokemon snap was a roller coaster ride from beginning to end and fun and alba wasn’t. Alba was a collectathon where you just collect things and pick up trash. I remember going to the castle and the next day there was trash by the bin. No one goes up there and the town is so small, it begs the question, who’s the one littering all over the place? The story of the world is just very inconsistent with what the game is trying to tell. The need to pick up trash is just a game dev putting it there to waste the players time. Having it around the place is ok at the start but having trash appear in other parts of the world throughout the game becomes too much. I kinda expected there to be more animals but then again there really can’t on this island since it’s too small. I wish Alba could run. There’s no option to but getting around the island takes kinda long. The story isn’t good but I knew that going into the game. I just wanted a nice casual game where you take pictures of animals. I think it was alright. Not good but not bad. Also, you don’t even need to collect everything to get all signatures cause the game just fills it for you. Getting everything is just a thing that you can do if you want to. I wish the game was more of an adventure. I remember at the start I was excited and as the game went on I instantly started to get bored. There’s no music in the game and I get that the game is about helping nature but I really feel that having music would have helped the game instead of hearing birds chirp and silence. Like, there is music but it turns on after a new day at the house and then 5 seconds later it turns off, the song just fades and ends… Yeah, this game is just mediocre. Looks cute though.