positive wildlife conservation themes and pretty wholesome.

the gameplay isn't anything too insane. most of it is just taking pictures and pressing A until you've interacted with everything in a given area, but it's clearly created for a younger audience and so i don't think its fair for me to say "wow gameplay chugs" or anything like that. definitely the best part is trying to get all of the animals scanned on your phone, as you can listen to the sounds they make in the wildlife guide and then recognize that sound in game to figure out where they are if you can't easily see them.

unfortunately, i feel like so many birds look like each other (lmao) and that's kinda just a fault of reality, i guess, but when they're flying in the air and such it's very difficult to actually tell what a bird is unless you're pointing the camera at it. as such, a large portion of this game is spent looking at birds with your camera that you already have logged, which ends up feeling a little silly. totally could be a me problem though for sure. also, the wildlife guide is disappointingly bare. it has all of the creatures, what they look like, their scientific name, and their sound, but that's it. there's no fun fact or diet or wingspan or anything listed about the creatures, and that ends up making them feel more like checks on a checklist as opposed to creatures that you should strive to conserve, which i feel reduces the effect of this game overall.

there is a website called Ecologi that supports reforestation, and the creators of Alba, Ustwo Games, commits one tree to that mission for every game downloaded or sold. as of my time of writing, they're currently in place 5th on the leaderboard for businesses with just over 1 million trees funded, which i think is pretty neat. to conclude: Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a cute and simple game without much mechanical depth, but one for a good cause. i think it's pretty easy to get behind, and definitely deserves to exist.

Arthur and the Invisibles is a game based off a movie of the same name about a 10 year old boy and his romantic endeavors with a 1,080 year old, made by a man who dated and married a 15 year old when he was 38. I don’t actually want to talk about either of those things though, thankfully. I want to talk about possibly one of the most feverish things I’ve ever randomly happened upon in my entire life.

There is a movie called “Arthur, malédiction”, which is a horror movie about a boy who loved Arthur and the Invisibles so much that he wanted to be a minimoy when he grew up. When he turns 18 him and his friends, for his birthday, go and visit the abandoned house where the movie was shot originally. Of course the horror of an 18 year old who’s entire bedroom was decorated with Arthur and the Invisibles memorabilia wasn’t actually enough, they had to at least try to make it scary, and nothing is scarier than french people in a foggy forest. I’m going to spoil this whole movie because you really don’t care. If you somehow do, I’m really sorry to hear that. First tragedy of this movie, their cooler with enough food for maybe 12 hours that they were going to be living off of for a week gets raided, oh no. They send one person back 800 meters to the car to go and get more food. He gets punched in the face in the woods, what could have happened? We cut back half way through the movie to see that his arms are stuck hugging a tree and the rest of his body has been consumed by the tree? Okay. Onto the next part, one of their friends from earlier in the movie from one scene is seen hanging upside down from a tree by 2 of the group, they untie the rope to slowly lower him to the ground, but it was trapped and there was a bear trap by the rope! He gets caught in the bear trap, let’s go of the rope and the tied up guy falls and breaks his neck and dies. The 2 people that tried to help him down go wait in the car to get help, but they don’t have the keys! The rest of the group tells them if there’s danger, honk the horn 5 times. They honk the horn 5 times, they hear him honk the horn, and then go “uhh let’s go the other direction actually”. They both die. Next, a girl, who is allergic to bees, locks herself in a garage with a big bee hive in it, gets stung by all the bees and dies. Probably the scariest part of all, a mysterious hooded man cuts out the rope of a swing one of the girls was sitting on, causing her to fall through the floor of the porch 50 meters underground into a secret underground sacrificial chamber. They end up getting her back but never explain what that was about. And then finally the remaining members of the group are all kidnapped by a very racist indigenous african tribe? In France? The movie ends with the entire tribe being gunned down by a very stereotypical racist white hick with a shotgun. Fun!

Now you might wonder why I just talked about the parts where they all died and not about its relation to Arthur, and that’s because it doesn’t have one. The conceit is that this group of people discovered the house and got cursed by it and went crazy so they started doing racially stereotyped tribal rituals where they sacrifice people to the minimoys I guess? It’s implied that the minimoys are actually real in this setting but who fucking cares. We can now officially set the count for “how many pieces of Arthur and the invisibles media are racist or pedophilic” back to 0. I kinda hoped this would be more self aware being made by a different person but this guy must be the only living breathing Arthur and the invisibles fan left, a real, walking fossil. Oh yea, the game. It’s bad?