Release: September 15th, 2021
Developers: Diego Garcia, Max Coburn
A top-down adventure where you mosey around a town, talk to people, and take pictures in the run-up to a bird photography contest. In contrast to the arcadey Whitewater Wipeout, this one is more of what we might expect from a modern indie game: a tone, a well-executed gimmick, an afternoon’s worth of gameplay, and a special little world that doesn’t overstay its welcome or feel underexplored.
Let’s get reductive. It’s a 2D Pokemon Snap demake with its tongue in its cheek. Your character moves into a new town and receives a little birding encyclopaedia to fill. There’s even a rival team to roadblock progress. With only 27 birds and being a strictly single-player experience, there’s only so much to be done. That’s grand, because the little journey is packed with love and silliness. The crank’s main function here is to focus your phone’s camera to take better shots of birds. This doesn’t get old, mostly because the game usually creates puzzles around locating the birds themselves rather than requiring any particular dexterity or timing with the picture taking. This was absolutely the right call.
My previous post said that Whitewater Wipeout didn’t do much to plant a unique flag for the Playdate in the gaming landscape. This is the other game available in the first week of Season One and it helps the system’s case significantly. It makes me wonder if instead of the crank or the minimalism that comes about from the hardware’s (mostly intentional) limitations, the Playdate’s unique selling point may be irreverence. Just a moment before you leave. WW has its surfer dudeisms and makes light fun of the player’s failures with a you-suck tone you don’t often see in non-indie games. I can take or leave that. Casual Birder, however, wouldn’t be anything without its sense of humour. There’s cheeky NPCs, over-the-top character portraits, and nebulous, exuberant flavour text. This kind of self-awareness is always at risk of making a game feel dated or too-clever-by-half, but CB mostly sticks the landing by piling great little moment upon great little moment until it’s over and you have several screenshots of smiles it brought you to look back on.
To rattle off these instances would be to rob you of the fun of coming across them yourself, so I’ll just share one as an example. One bird can only be found if you repeatedly litter in a coffee shop, annoying the barista until they literally throw you out with the trash… which attracts a bird to snap. More generally, the game’s presentation is phenomenal. The Playdate must have an impressively high pixel density to be able to pull off the different shades of darkness in caves. It reminds me a little of World of Horror, or how PC-98 games would achieve amazing colours and detail through dithering. Squint in houses and marvel at the surprising detail, like posters with miniscule writing and tiny desk decorations. NPC character portraits are sometimes so expressive and detailed they bring to mind Phoenix Wright defendants melting down. Max Coburn’s music (a.k.a Maxo… brought back good memories of Cool Games Inc.) sounds almost like a parody of videogame music, but with such solid, jaunty funk that it remains catchy long after the gamey novelty disappears. The tone captures Casual Birder as a whole: a short, cheerful videogame thrilled to be a videogame. A great fit for a system that seems itself intended for short, cheerful experiences.
Shrunken Shrine 