Alba is the game my daughter and I play four-handed

Finding a video game you can play with a four-year-old is its own kind of wildlife expedition. Which is convenient, because that's today's subject. Most games run on enemies that charge and pits that wait, and a kid still working out her motor skills will find one every ten seconds. Take it from a father who has tested this at scale. Then we started Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, and our weekends gained a standing appointment.

An island with no wolves and no cliffs

Alba came out in late 2020 from ustwo Games, the studio behind Monument Valley¹. It drops a little girl at her grandparents' place on a Mediterranean island modeled on the Spanish coast. A developer wants to bulldoze the nature reserve for a luxury hotel, so Alba and her friend Inés start a wildlife rescue league, and you do all the actual work. You roam the island, photograph animals with your phone to identify them, fix birdhouses, pick up trash, and patch up injured critters.

No enemies, no holes to fall into, no way to fail. The studio calls its own game a "chillectathon"², and for once a marketing portmanteau describes the product.

Ecology without the sermon

Every animal you photograph goes into a field notebook, so the stroll is basically a nature class that never says so. My daughter is learning to tell species apart and to aim calmly instead of mashing buttons. The conservation message lands on its own, without a single character climbing into a pulpit.

It even spills off the screen. ustwo plants a real tree for every copy sold or downloaded, funding a mangrove restoration program in Madagascar through Ecologi³. The game is rated PEGI 3, so it's fine for preschoolers⁴, and honestly, it's rare for a label to match what you get with the controller in hand.

The controller changes hands

We play on a PC hooked up to the living room TV. At four, my daughter is still figuring out how to steer a character without driving it into the scenery. Most games punish that with a game-over screen before she's even worked out what she did wrong. Here she runs wherever she likes while I ride shotgun. The dialogue and cutscenes are short, so I read them to her out loud instead of skipping through them the way I would on my own.

Our sessions fit inside one weekend hour. At that pace, any six-hour game turns into a full season of TV, and the usual arguments about playtime start to look a little silly. So no, we haven't finished it. But the completionist in me (he sleeps with one eye open) has already decided we're going for 100%⁵.

And the machine doesn't even break a sweat

One last point in its favor is that the stylized graphics, which would look right at home on a Switch, run on modest hardware. With data centers sending RAM prices through the roof⁶, a game that runs fine on the computer you already own deserves a little credit.

If you're looking for a game to share with a small child, which is harder to find than an Iberian lynx, go get this one. I'll probably write about other games in the same spirit, especially as my daughter gets good enough for tougher worlds. Unless, of course, she decides one day that her dad is an obsolete gaming partner and influencer videos beat an island full of birds. I have a few years left to make my case.

Notes

1. The game's Wikipedia page: released December 11, 2020 on PC, Mac, and iOS, ported to consoles in June 2021, and winner of a 2021 Apple Design Award in the Social Impact category. ↩

2. The word appears in plain sight on the Steam store page, where the game often sells for the price of a coffee. ↩

3. The "Alba's Forest" program, described on the official site, aims for one million trees planted with Ecologi and Eden Reforestation Projects. ↩

4. You can check the rating on the Family Gaming Database, which catalogs family-friendly games. ↩

5. I almost wrote "platinum it," but platinum trophies only exist on PlayStation. The compulsion ships on every platform. ↩

6. On the global memory shortage and the price surge that came with it, see IEEE Spectrum. ↩