Talkin' 'Bout Tiny Games

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure & NUTS

This is the first part of a two parter covering the games Alba: A Wildlife Adventure and NUTS. This part is business as usual for the most part – I’m recommending two small games with a common theme. The next part will be me rambling about NUTS and its themes and how it constrasts with Alba, for which spoilers will abound. On with the show.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a photography game about being a young girl who uses documentation of wildlife in order to advocate for the preservation of nature in face of corporate development. NUTS is a puzzle game about engaging in squirrel reconnaissance as a part of a research study in face of megacorporate expansion. I played these two games in succession, and so given their different takes on similar themes, I mentally compared them as I played. And thus comes the report of my little scientific study: they’re good games, Brent.

Alba is a plucky little adventure on the idyllic little island Alba Singh visits every summer to see her grandmother and grandfather. The aesthetic feels a bit like a 3D translation of the modern 2D aesthetic for children’s cartoons – very simplified and geometric but still expressive, with lush scenery and a sunlit colour palette. The only problem is that the derelict wildlife reserve has been slated by the mayor to be destroyed in order to build a luxury hotel as a way of attracting more tourists. So Alba and her friend Inés embark on a quest in order to rejuvenate the reserve and prove the worth of the island’s natural attractions.

For the most part, this involves seeking out and taking photographs of various wildlife species in order to raise people’s interest and awareness of the animals that surround them, but in between that you’re tasked with finding other things – birdhouses and picnic tables to repair, animals trapped in garbage, the source of a curious but dangerous trail of chemical liquid, and so on. These small tasks help build a survey of the various ways the wildlife has declined on the island, and how things can be incrementally improved.

The experience is a cozy one – its plot is almost seemingly from a modern children’s cartoon to match the aesthetic, and carries all the optimism with. Exploring the island and documenting the wildlife makes for a pleasant escapist experience amidst the sense of powerlessness that cane come about with the environmental state of the real world.

However, if you’re looking for something more grounded, NUTS involves being a research team hire sent to the Melmoth forest in order to record squirrels. As it turns out, those furry little scamps are the crux of Professor Nina Scholz’s case against the Panorama corporation and their plans of razing the forest in order to build their amusement park Panoramaland. The forest itself is grand in the height of its foliage and the changes in topography, but the game’s slightly fantastical two-tone aesthetic coupled with the soft field-of-vision fog gives you a sense of cool solitude.

Your part of the research is to track various squirrels by setting up cameras to see where they go in the night, eventually finding their stash of nuts. It’s gradual work over several in-game days – whereas Alba’s method of photographing her world involves a phone camera and a wildlife identification app, the technology in NUTS is steadfastly analog – communication between the player and Nina occurs via fax machine and spiral-corded telephone, and the TVs that send back the recorded footage are delightfully boxy.

But I have to say, the gameplay loop of setting up cameras based on where you saw your target scamper off to the night before, betting on which positions will have the best chances of revealing the most information, seeing the results that night and then relocating the cameras based on that hooked me hard. It had me hot on the trail of whatever squirrels I was supposed to track, all the while I tried to be smarter and more efficient about finding them. The rush that it gave me was similar to the one I had playing the excellent detective game Tangle Tower, despite the fact that it lacks all of the typical mechanics of a detective game.

Of course, given the more grounded presentation and premise of NUTS, the story follows in the same suit. The corporate threat is more than just implied, as this is their second go at funding Panoramaland, and the scars of their influence are stark in the narrative and parts of the landscape of the game. Unlike Alba, it’s not a cozy experience that functions in escapism (or maybe that’s the wrong word, as I’m fairly certain Alba is made for children), but in that, it also functions as a more substantive take on its themes.

Specifications (Alba)

• Windows (also Apple Arcade subscription)
• $16.99 USD
  
• ~5 hours

Specifications (Nuts)

• Windows, Mac
• $19.99 USD
  
• ~6-7 hours