Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
Year: 2020
Rating: E
Time Played: 193 minutes / 3.22 hours
As I go through my backlog of free games I received from the Epic Games store, I’ve been trying to find games I can play with my daughter. Alba: A Wildlife Adventure seemed like it would be a good fit for us to play together, and It certainly was. Alba is a fairly simple game and doesn’t take that long to play all the way through. In fact, I 100% cleared the game in the almost three-and-a-half hours we played together.
Set on an Iberian island, Alba follows the adventures of the titular character who is spending some of her summer with her grandparents. With her handy smartphone, Alba must collect pictures of all the different wildlife on the island, filling up a digital field guide in the process. Along the way, Alba must help clean up the island and repair the wildlife preserve that was closed after a suspicious fire. The simple art design and controls made for a charming play-through, even if its re-playability level is low.
My only qualm with the game is the somewhat heavy-handed and cliche resort developer plotline. I know it’s probably closer to real life than I’d like to admit. It just feels overdone like it came out of a Saturday Morning cartoon from the 80s or 90s. If anything, there seemed to be some nuance from the residents of the island, who could see the benefit of a resort bringing much-needed tourist money to the island despite the conservation area being destroyed to do so. In the end, though, the title character collected all the pictures of animals and saved the day, showing how we need to live in harmony with nature around us.
A short and charming game about conservation, I give Alba: A Wildlife Adventure 4.0 stars out of 5.
