Happy Birthdays (Switch)
Every living thing has a birthday, and if you think about it, so does every species that has ever existed. There was, sometime long ago, a moment where evolution managed to create something recognizably brand new, that being the birthday for a whole new walk of life. Happy Birthdays, also known as Birthdays: The Beginning on platforms other than the Switch, is essentially a game about trying to make those species birthdays happen.
In this simulation game, you are at first a normal human, but a blue diamond pulls you to another world and requests your aid. This diamond, named Navi, wants to cultivate a small cube shaped planet to reach its point in history where humans have not only evolved from earlier species, but have begun to create modern civilizations. Navi can’t make anything though, so after putting you into an almost alien-like body, you essentially get to play the role of a somewhat hands-off god, the player needing to alter the landscape and prod species in certain directions so they can gradually develop into the new animals or vegetation you want to see.
Happy Birthdays is a very hands-off god game when you look at the exact ways you can try to nudge evolution along. For the most part, you fly around your cube shaped world unable to directly interact with any form of life in a major way. Instead, your main means of tipping the balance will be by altering the geography of the area. Every form of life has some sort of requirement for existing in Happy Birthdays, these usually tying heavily to elements like temperature and moisture. To change the temperature of what almost feels like your little garden of a world, you need to start altering the elevation of spaces. Higher up areas are cooler while low spaces and water add to the planet’s heat, and since life needs water, you’ll want to also ensure you make some rivers or oceans to manage the moisture levels and encourage plant growth. This is a simple and understandable enough starting point for the game’s goal of altering the course of life on your world by tinkering with the environment, but sadly, this isn’t just the main way, it is quite nearly the only way you can influence how life grows on your personal cube planet.
Technically, there are special abilities you can utilize to enact an immediate and sometimes drastic change, but these require you to build up energy, often over long periods or by creating new species, and even when they’re available, they’re often not too impactful. You can, for instance, give a living thing some Water of Life to make them breed a bit more often, you can deploy a rain cloud or scorching sun to alter the moisture in that area for a while, and you can even try to force a mutation to see if a new species will arise. These more powerful abilities like an immediate extinction of one species are quite costly and sometimes you’ll want to spend your ability points just altering ground in cleaner shapes than the standard option. Normally you can raise or lower an area in a set square grid of various sizes, so it’s fairly inevitable your world will be a bit boxy in shape. However, the life that inhabits it will end up being rather cute and colorful, be they dinosaurs, more recognizable modern creatures, or some very specific picks as the game has a wide range of possible lifeforms and only cheeses it somewhat by having some things like a giant sloth just use a different colored bear model to represent it. The animals in your cube just mill about, carnivores conveniently generating meat chunks instead of hunting prey, and while the different stages of human development will lead to unique settlement types, you won’t see very many advanced or interesting behaviors from the species you bring to life.
In the game’s main story challenges, you are free to pick from one of four world types, although the end goal to reach humankind’s advancement to modernity is always the end goal. Naturally though, if you’re working with a grassy space, the evolutionary path will be different than if you choose the desert world, but not to a meaningful enough degree. You will see a different range of starting dinosaurs, your goals along the way involve new creatures you need to bring to life, but since they’re usually just a cartoon creature with a list of preferences, it doesn’t feel as special as it should to make something like a mammoth appear. You do have a tree of life you can consult to learn how to cater things towards a new creature you’re trying to evolve towards and oftentimes animals have prerequisites like having other species present, essentially ensuring a food chain exists even if you can’t see it unfold. That is the unfortunate truth of Happy Birthdays though. Getting unique or impressive lifeforms to appear has no major payoff since they just amble about the cube, and while you can try to collect them to expand the tree of life you reference, it’s a very plain form of collection where they often feel like items on a checklist instead of a brand new living thing.
If Happy Birthdays was more of an idle garden you leave alone for a bit to see what springs to life, it might be a bit more interesting, but it actually demands some active attention for your world to grow. There are two views, one where you’re floating around down amidst the life, and then a zoomed out view of your entire cube that unfortunately turns all life invisible. When zoomed out, you can advance time, able to make millenia pass very quickly to encourage evolution. You’ll get notifications alerting you to how populations fair as well as birthday notifications for when a brand new species comes into existence, and while you can technically just let it run unattended while you fast forward time, it will settle down after a while if you don’t pop back in to interfere and tip the scales somehow. Another sad part of that though is even when you pop in thousands of years later, you can still sometimes find your world’s inhabitants are still exactly where you left them, the simulation of life very simplistic as these really feel more like representations of what lives on your world rather than something that’s truly living its life before your eyes.
There is at least some fascination to seeing how a small alteration can skew how your cube world is inhabited, and in the story maps, you shouldn’t spend too long without something to do as you can always try to make things a bit more accommodating for whatever species you want to appear next. However, if you want more freedom and choose to make your own world from scratch, you’ll learn the harsh but factual lesson that life is slow to develop. That’s clearly why the game starts you off basically in prehistoric times instead of the start of the world for the story, but if you have the patience for trying to coax plankton into becoming something more interesting, the free play mode at least exists as an option. It even allows importing elements from the story mode too, so you can copy the map over or just your evolutionary trees to try and speed up cultivating your new world free of objectives. You can’t fail in story though, but there is a very unfortunate element of the main mode that makes it a chore to replay. The tutorial, a very lengthy one that’s popping up to talk repeatedly, cannot be skipped in the story maps save for small chunks like the basic controls.
The controls aren’t always the greatest either, whether it be highlighting the animal you wan to focus on or trying to point at things at different elevations since your avatar always wants to be just above the ground even when you’re trying to interact with flying pterosaurs or fish swimming down below. There are definitely a great deal of things to learn to manage the world despite how simple it all feels in actual practice, all that tutorial explanation not coming with as much knowledge as you might hope. There are, however, the Dino Challenges, the game providing a surprisingly small batch of specific worlds with the goal to make one very specific dinosaur species appear. You’ll have unusual limits like global temperature changing in greater amounts or you’ll be stuck with giant walls blocking off parts of your cube, but these are mostly just going to involve consulting the tree of life, then raising and lowering ground so you get the right temperatures and water levels to make it possible for something like a T-Rex to evolve. There are some smaller goals to get decorations for doing specific interactions like making a certain species appear or messing with your world in a certain way, but it’s not really enough to add the longevity you’d like from a game that promises to allow you to guide evolution and yet can’t think of many interesting ways for you to do so.
THE VERDICT: Happy Birthdays gives you the most mundane powers of a god, being able to raise and lower ground to see how the life on your cube world will adapt to such changes. Trying to cater things to make a specific species appear does have a small appeal, as does seeing what unexpected consequences occur due to your minor meddling, but it’s hard to really find the exact appeal of Happy Birthdays. It’s not a hands-off garden since you can’t even see things well when advancing time and your ecosystem mostly just involves lifeforms milling about, but your special abilities and other tools for changing things besides elevation are minimal or rarely of use. The story and challenges try to give it a bit more structure, but Happy Birthdays feels a bit closer to watching how an ant farm reacts to you dumping in new soil rather than being the guiding hand of evolution.
And so, I give Happy Birthdays for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. Happy Birthdays feels a bit like it’s the game that was released after an advanced evolution system just wouldn’t come together and they felt like the work might as well be put out there instead of scrapped. It’s not totally uninteresting, seeing your world grow in its own unique way does have some appeal. It’s easy to be a bit amused seeing humans walk around alongside dimetrodons since the extinctions pan out differently on your little planet than they did in reality, but it would be more interesting if that meant anything beyond a visual touch. The systems at play aren’t complex or involved so you aren’t getting an ecosystem so much as a diorama of whatever happened to survive your fiddling with the elevations. With your main form of influence often being just moving ground up or down, that does end up making Happy Birthdays rather boring and focused on the less interesting parts of it. Making the ocean lower or a mountain a little higher, than having to tweak it a touch more, all trying to get the temperature or moisture to even out, it’s not a particularly captivating task. Your abilities held some promise, trying to force a mutation for example always coming with a little mystery on whether it will work and then the possible payoff of the birthday notification, but your interactions are deliberately kept detached without the payoffs for your subtle hand being interesting enough to compensate. Happy Birthdays might scratch an itch for a specific player looking for this style of game which is one reason it’s merely bad rather than awful, but it also feels like there are so many ways to make this system more engaging and robust that those same fans would likely ditch Happy Birthdays if some more ambitious god game in the same vein could scratch this specific itch.
Happy Birthdays is the start of a good idea without the necessary follow-through to make it more than mildly interesting at best. There’s only so much satisfaction to be had form learning that hill you made lead to a new species of flower being born, and with the ecosystem simulation being so barebones, it doesn’t feel true to life while also not having enough fantasy elements to compensate. Your thought processes for making your world grow are often pretty basic and rarely are you troubled trying to guide things well with the zoomed out Macro Mode making it even less interesting to see the process of adaptation and evolution. It’s a shame the game’s name on other platforms, Birthdays: The Beginning, wasn’t a hint at a more involved and intricate follow-up, but the beginning here seems to have also been the end of this half-baked evolution simulator.