Casual Birder (Playdate)

Panic’s Playdate system comes with a full “season” of 24 included games for anyone who purchases it, but it doesn’t just throw them at you right out of the gate. While you can change the settings to receive them immediately, the Playdate system by default will unlock two video games a week to try and make it more of an experience. This means, while Whitewater Wipeout is presented to you first, the simple retro score chasing surfing game isn’t on its own. To counterbalance that more demanding experience, Playdate owners also receive the rather appropriately named Casual Birder, a much more relaxed adventure focused in more on a comedic and quirky experience you can finish in a few hours.

Casual Birder begins with its main character arriving at Bird Town where a photo contest is about to be held, and in a town nuts about bird-watching, everyone is abuzz about the possibility of potentially winning the contest with a shot of the Legendary Bird.  Unfortunately, a gang of bullies known as the Pearly Eyed Thrushers are using the threat of violence to keep anyone else from finding it, and after you have a rough run in with them early on, a former bird photographer named Maggie believes you have the right stuff (and the ability to bounce back from being beat up) to go out there, snap shots of the local wildlife, and find the Legendary Bird despite the Pearly Eyed Thrushers’ interference. Beyond their love of birds though, the citizens of Bird Town tend to have other quirks that make your work exploring for birds to photograph more eccentric and these eccentricities can actually relate to interesting inventory and interaction puzzles. One of the gang members for example has an obvious crush you can distract her with, but the clues aren’t so direct that you’ll immediately know the solution until you start connecting the dots. A lot of people have a personal connection to a local bird or the ability to trigger their appearance, but you’ll need to find out the right actions to get them to help you out, the small town quickly becoming a hub you travel across as you start figuring out all the ways things connect.

The charmingly goofy people of Bird Town make each new area you walk into a bit more interesting as you never know if you’ll find something strange like a skinny-dipping couple convinced a bird watcher is peeping on them or some new helpful area like the busy cafe where you can learn a good deal from almost everyone present. While interacting with people is going to be vital to completing the story, the birds you find in each location are often just as important, Bird Town having quite a range of avian inhabitants that the main character just can’t seem to name properly. While you’ll see things you’d consider a hummingbird, crow, or heron, the protagonist instead calls them a Bumbling Hoverbird, Corm, and Sweet Blue Herman, the delightfully askew descriptions in his album making the birds fun to find before their value in puzzle solving comes up. Not only are they sometimes the tool for clearing an obstacle in your path, but you’ll often need to get helpful items or the right kind of camera to properly capture them and add them to your photobook. You don’t need a shot of every single bird to complete the game, but most every screen that serves as more than a connecting space will have a bird, and while there are a few freebies you won’t need to do much work for, many others have unique ways to goad them out in the open or overcome their skittishness or speedy flight.

Your inventory in Casual Birder is tied to the Playdate’s crank and while it is a bit touchy, sometimes not really detecting you swapped an item after you’ve spun it unless you’re spot on in your circular menu, this only really presents a problem during a singular moment where changing items quickly is key. Otherwise, you’re usually in a more relaxed situation where you can pull out the needed item or your camera and get to work. Photographing a bird (or other objects since your photos can be vital puzzle solutions as well) will restrict your view of the area to just the preview screen of your camera. From there though, you’ll need to adjust your focus with the crank, this sometimes more just a novelty and at others it can impact whether or not you can even get a decent quality photo of a speedier target. You do get camera upgrades as well as tools like a bird call so sometimes you do need to move on and return to a bird later, and thankfully Bird Town is pretty tiny so even though you’re lacking a map and sometimes the exits for a screen are a touch unclear, it’s not hard to traverse its entirety when you’ve got some new idea to test or you’re searching for the next task you are able to complete.

The Playdate’s 1-bit display does mean some birds are just tiny black specks with some bird features attached, but generally Casual Birder is able to create some distinct and fairly majestic looking birds as well. On top of that, a lot of fun can be had from the large and detailed expressions of characters when spoken too, almost all of them delightful cartoonish exaggerations that make their already silly lines even funnier. Bird Town is the kind of place to have a pet store called “DOGS ONLY (and other pets too)” and yet the owner has never seen a dog before and just thinks he’s figured out what they want. There are plenty of memorable peculiarities to supplement the problem solving, so while photos aren’t really ever judged for their quality, the photography elements don’t feel like they needed to be complex in order to carry this lovely little Playdate launch title.

THE VERDICT: Casual Birder is a quirky little adventure where the strange and silly characters and situations you encounter bring a lot of charm to a game that already had a good sense for how to design its puzzles. Add in some peppy music and humorously exaggerated characters and Casual Birder remains delightful enough on aesthetic alone to carry you through the hour or so it takes to complete, but while the photography can be a touch simple, it connects well to the different interactions necessary to advance while also adding the small but entertaining goal of grabbing a shot of every bird in Bird Town.

And so, I give Casual Birder for Playdate…

A GOOD rating. While it’s easy to ask for some critique system for the quality of pictures taken in almost any photography game that doesn’t feature them, Casual Birder was right to keep them connected instead to the inventory puzzles and interactions with the citizens of Bird Town instead. While you have some freedom to set up shots how you like, their main purpose is as a more interesting tool than items you just find or are handed to you. Many of the birds you encounter thus have a little test or sequence of events necessary to acquiring a useful shot of them, helping to add them to the spiderweb of interactions around town that never get too obtuse and yet they can be rather smart about which details to provide and leave out so the problem solving isn’t too basic or difficult. Keeping the town and game length small both benefit the player as they can better connect the dots and retain useful info as the game progresses, and to help that along the citizens are all a little weird or wacky so they stick a bit better in your memory. Besides the slight jankiness with things like the inventory and some brief slowdown when whipping out a camera, Casual Birder ends up feeling like the kind of game you just want to see more of even though it does make good use of its ideas in the short span of time it does last. Frequently creative with how birds can be a bit different in how you get them in your sights, the photography is still more than just a way to get necessary items for interactions with humans.

Casual Birder is a wonderful companion for Whitewater Wipeout for an introduction to the system. Whitewater Wipeout’s old school design and heavy skill focus provide a different experience then this relaxed adventure more focused on figuring things out and laughing at the odd finds you make along the way.  This plucky little game concept also feels pretty at home with the deliberate oddity of the Playdate, both of them not exactly the standard experience one might expect, but a comedic photography game ends up being a nice tonal first impression if you do elect to play it instead of its companion release first.