Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
Snapping some summer memories
Perfectly capturing the feeling of a week away with your grandparents, this summer adventure is suitably warm and unforgettable. It’s set on a small, close-knit Mediterranean island, where your desire to explore nature turns into a quest to save its rundown nature reserve.
This is a place Alba has visited throughout her childhood, so she’s familiar with the sunshine and chill vibes, and has made friends with some of the regular inhabitants like Ines, a fellow excitable child. Having once captured a photo of a rare lynx, Alba comes to realise that the environment for the island’s animals is on the decline. After she and Ines help save a beached dolphin, they set up AIWRL – the Alba and Ines Wildlife Rescue League.
Your grandfather gives you a guidebook, and helps set your phone camera up with an app that scans and catalogues new animals when you line up photos. Using this, you can discover the island’s plentiful wildlife while you help clean the place up. That means putting strewn rubbish in bins, helping unwell critters, and even replacing photos of animals on information placards. While the island is small, it feels big to a child, the game perfectly capturing that mood of things feeling bigger and grander when you’re still a wee one.
HOTEL MEDITERRANEAN
Early on, the mayor announces the wildlife reserve will be replaced with a luxury hotel, and the focus of your summer vacation week becomes collecting enough signatures to prove him wrong. This is the kind of game where the end credits begin with links to wildlife charities.
But there’s no time pressure. Your petition fills up as the story plays out day to day, keeping the tone relaxing. It’s a game full of little touches of personality, from the way Alba switches between skipping and holding her arms out like an aeroplane when she runs to answering yes or no questions by manually nodding or shaking her head with the right analogue stick.
These touches are enhanced on PS5 thanks to the DualSense. Haptics mimic Alba’s footsteps, altering depending on the material she’s moving across. Sometimes it feels a bit much, but running on wood, in particular, feels lovely. Similarly, the bubbly sound of character dialogue is reflected in the haptics, different tones coming through the controller.
The simple block-colour visuals add to that, creating a
Perfectly captures that mood of things feeling bigger and grander when you’re still a wee one.
sunny place that you want to explore. We experienced some crashes while suspending play, but frequent autosaves stopped this from having a big impact. Simple to play and delightfully breezy to get through, it’s both perfect for kids and a relaxing bath of a game for when you want something low-pressure.