‘Alba: A Wildlife Adventure’ is the Most Joyful Experience I’ve Had in Gaming This Year
Growing up, one of the annoyances of having a penchant for all things digital is when significant adults interrupt your enjoyment to send you “outside.” While there is no doubt that physical activity is important for one’s bodily and mental health, and playing outside is one of the primary modes with which children learn to socialize, going outside was always framed as a sort of punishment. Adults didn’t like that I was spending my weekend playing video games or watching cartoons, even reading books, so out I’d go.
One of the pleasures of adulthood is no longer feeling beholden to those random adults and their capricious whims. Yet, I almost certainly spend more time outside voluntarily than I did at any given period throughout my childhood. At least, this was the case until the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. I was lucky enough to live in a place where, even when my gym closed down, I was able to maintain my daily exercise routine. Instead of jogging on the treadmill, I started routing various paths through my neighborhood and nearby parks.
In a few idle months, I began learning the rhythms of the wildlife, the morning routines of my neighbors, and I started noticing the gradual changes throughout the quiet waking streets: the flowers that weren’t planted there yesterday, the litter (often in the form of abandoned surgical masks) blowing into front lawns, the recently trimmed palm tree that dislodged a bird’s nest. Even local construction projects that, in the normal cadence of my everyday life, seemed to take forever, suddenly felt like little stop-motion photographs evolving each day I passed them.
Playing Alba at the Right Time
Enter Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which first released at the tail end of 2020, a little indie game dedicated to exploring and conserving the meager habitat of a local island. It’s a game that felt like it perfectly matched the pitch of what many people were missing at this isolating, indoor period in American culture. It even released with an environmentally friendly promise to plant one tree for every copy of the game sold! Alba felt like a tonic to the year that made so many of us feel trapped within the four-walled confines of our homes. But for whatever reason – namely, an extensive backlog – I wouldn’t end up launching the game for an entire year.
I finally launched Alba in January of 2022 when I was deep in the throes of an indie kick. After spending the better part of my 2021 chasing new big-budget releases, most of which boasted a runtime of well over 30 hours, I began my year seeking experiences that could safely be digested within the scope of a normal two-day weekend. In this brief period, I consumed darlings like Sable, The Artful Escape, Haven, and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. Amidst those many high points in my gaming library, Alba quickly nested itself as one of the most joyful, optimistic stories I’ve encountered in a game in some time.
In Alba, the stakes are comparatively low – at least, as far as most games are concerned. The story of Alba takes place on a small island featuring a dozen or two buildings. The island clearly is beloved by its scant inhabitants, and despite its small nature, the villagers there clearly adore their living situation. From the vibrant multilingual culture to the pockets of biodiversity, often undisturbed in marshland and woodland preserves, the humble island of Alba reveals itself to be a crucial wellspring for a number of endangered or rarely encountered species.
Getting Started With Alba‘s Gameplay
As a video game, understanding Alba is quite simple. A little girl, Alba, visits an island with her grandparents in what feels like the middle of summer vacation. Though scaled over the course of a short week, the adventures on Alba’s island feel appropriate to the story being told. In the beginning, Alba runs around somewhat aimlessly, talking to villagers, befriending new people, and taking plenty of photos of the local wildlife on her phone. Borrowing from the lineage of Pokemon Snap, Alba is a shoot-em-up in the nonviolent sense, except you will get credit for archiving each species by simply capturing them in general.
Some of the species in Alba are decidedly more rare than others. The rarer the species, the more involved the process that the player must undertake to find and document that species in the wild. One of the simplest ways that species begin to reappear in the environment is through the recycling mechanic. In Alba, you can skip around through each biome on the island and collect litter – sometimes nearing trash cans, which is its own kind of infuriating. The removal of litter encourages animals that were avoiding the area to return, thereby enabling Alba to capture them on her smartphone.
Photographing & Optional Objectives
By capturing photos of the returning and rare species, Alba encourages the islanders and future tourists to treat this environment as sacred and special. To anyone who has ever strolled through a nature park and wondered absentmindedly at the sun bleached signage devoid of substantial information, Alba’s photo restoration mechanics speak to the importance of keeping parks tidy, aesthetically maintained, and informationally up-to-date. These chore-like activities in Alba might sound akin to volunteer work, but somehow Alba infuses them with enthusiasm such that I felt an intrinsic reward for going out of my way and completing them.
Alba does not force its checklist on the player either, which is a brilliant design decision in my opinion. Each of the few days on Alba’s Pinar del Mar island is spent with a small handful of mandatory tasks, most of which involve the act of visiting a specific island location, speaking to someone who perceives a problem – usually with industrial construction or species in a crisis – and Alba solving it. Alba is portrayed as a small child who arguably shouldn’t be intermingling herself in the affairs of adults, but her unbridled optimism and eagerness to make the island – and, one would expect, the world – a better place infected me as the player with the desire to join in on every optional quest that the island had to offer.
The curious result of deciding to complete the island’s optional objectives is that I began playing Alba with the desire to earn all in-game achievements on Steam. Luckily, with Alba, the achievements are all automatic and unmissable if you simply pursue the credits. Instead of the game tying itself to arbitrary tasks like documenting every single island species or recycling every stray modicum of litter, my motivational approach to the game shifted significantly. Oddly enough, you might expect that detaching such tasks from achievements and objectives would reduce my inclination to complete such tasks, but I found that tetherless approach to game design to be quite freeing and satisfying.
The Narrative Arc of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
Until this point, I’ve avoided saying much about the core narrative of Alba, but it’s worth skimming through here. When Alba arrives on Pinar del Mar, life seems to be putzing around as usual. Her grandparents seem content living up in the hills of the island, occasionally socializing with the village’s do-gooder inhabitants like the local vet or ice cream salesperson. The shadow overlooking this idyllic scenario, however, manifests in the island’s mayor, whose greedy pockets have no bottom.
The crooked mayor has teamed up with an exploitative venture capitalist who plans to wipe clean one of the island’s otherwise protected marshes of wildland, laying an ugly concrete foundational slab and erecting a gaudy hotel. Fashioned in the likeness of the Burj Khalifa, or something similar in its obscene scale, this hotel intends to replace the island’s slow-paced nature with the hustle and bustle of tourism. Just by virtue of the shady back alley dealings with which the mayor and this capitalist are engaging, the task naturally falls to the island’s visiting child, Alba.
Of course, Alba is assisted by her childhood friend with whom she has been frolicking about the island for the game’s entirety. Upon learning of these nefarious construction plans, Alba and her friend begin plotting to thwart the hotel’s impending status. Sadly, because this game has a persistent bend towards optimism, you can’t simply commit arson to achieve these noble ends. Instead, Alba takes it upon herself to begin documenting endangered species, cleaning up the local parks, and increasing both the quality of life for the animals, allowing them to safely return to their previous abodes, and the villagers, whose lifestyles may have started to take these precious animal inhabitants for granted.
Soon, it becomes clear that Alba’s childlike attempts to protect the island on its own merits will not be sufficient to overcome the impending draw of tourism money. Thus, she takes it upon herself to surreptitiously tail the mayor around the island, snapping clandestine photos of his business dealings. Alba quickly accrues evidence of the mayor accepting dirty money, thereby confronting him directly. At first, it seems apparent that Alba will be strong-armed by this cynical adult, but by the game’s end, Alba has successfully rallied the island’s inhabitants to protest the construction of this hotel – a project which would undoubtedly bring an economic windfall to these otherwise isolated people.
The Joyful Conclusion of Alba
In the end, Alba’s plan succeeds. The mayor verbally repents his greed, denouncing the hotel project entirely. By the game’s finale, the island is not perfectly secure, but Alba’s contributions have been universally recognized as beneficial to all involved. Pinar del Mar throws a fiesta full of cheers, celebrations, fireworks, and dancing. Alba concludes as cheerfully as it began, and I watched the credits roll with a smile beaming on my face.
I know the point of Alba is largely conservationist in its philosophy, and I would be genuinely surprised if a sequel were to emerge, but I can’t help but express a desire to spend more time with Alba, her villager friends, and these wild species which are so lovingly interspersed with this otherwise intimate island environment.
The feeling Alba left me with throughout my four or five hours with the game was pure joy. I have played many games this year, especially small indie games with a tight narrative focus and expressive art style. But Alba tapped into a feeling of curiosity and optimism that games so rarely achieve, in my experience. I didn’t complete every single task on the island, which makes me feel inclined to boot the game back up and skip around the island some more. At the same time, however, the story and bookended experience of Alba was so tight and positive that I am equally content to let it rest in my memory as one of the truly prosocial games I’ve finished in the past few months. Alba wants to give back as much as its titular character gives to the island.
Alba wears its gaming niche on its sleeve, and I don’t expect the experience will resonate as powerfully with everyone. But in the same way that the coronavirus pandemic made me start to freshly appreciate my neighboring environments outside – even the Canada geese with their ill tempers and copious droppings piles – Alba made me appreciate the way that games can intentionally fly in the face of those hectoring childhood authority figures who unsuccessfully tried to drill the association in my developing brain that video games were a waste of time. Alba challenges you to give back to your own local community, to explore your own nature preserves, to capture the twitterings of rare species hidden in the branches. And I think that’s a beautiful goal for a game to aim at.
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