Allow time to fly by in this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic with the relaxing track, Time Unfolds (Arrangement 1) by Takayuki Nakamura. It’s the most common song that plays while playing TOYBOX Inc. & Arc System Works’ sandbox game, Birthdays the Beginning: a bizarre simulation about birthing new animals and species through terraforming. The music matches nicely to the mellow theme of the game that, quite frankly, is a lot more complex than the cutesy-graphics imply.
Like many highly-customizable games, Birthday the Beginnings have a story and creative mode. The narrative for the former stars an unnamed protagonist, who comes upon what seems like a mysterious treasure map. Curiosity gets the better of them, and they decides to follow its directions into a mysterious cave. When our hero delves too far into it, they seemingly get teleported into a new dimension where they can fly over a blank cube, and get pestered by an annoying Navi-like character explaining the rules. Our lead plants the “seed of life” handed to them onto the cube and starts terraforming in hopes of finding an escape from this dimension.
Birthday the Beginnings is essentially a simulation of evolution. Building mountains or digging valleys affects both the temperature of the new terrain, and the overall temperature of the cube. Balancing this aspect is critical to deliberately unlock more creatures, as older ones may need to die off. Aside from simply changing the land’s elevation, items are provided to augment the landscape slightly, including seeds of water and life to make waterfalls and new species accordingly.
Birthday the Beginnings was released on Steam for PC and Playstation 4. It’s sequel, Happy Birthdays, is seemingly only released in Japan for the Nintendo Switch.
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