Ratings and Reviews by EJ

This is a quiet, meditative game about going on a brief camping trip to get in touch with nature and get away from the stresses of everyday life. It’s divided into three sections: shopping, packing, and then the trip itself.

There’s some lovely writing here, and it could be an enjoyable small morsel of a game, but in its current state, typos, punctuation issues, formatting issues, and bugs are pervasive. I actually didn’t finish it; twice I hit a dead end with no links out, and the first time I restarted, but the second time I just gave up.

In real life I don’t have any hobbies that require me to be outdoors, because I’m very allergic to most plants. Sometimes I go to see an outdoor theatre production or concert, and then half an hour in I have a sinus headache and/or my asthma is acting up and I start wondering why I thought this would be fun. So I appreciate the opportunity to experience birding vicariously within my own air-filtered home.

Birding in Pope Lick Park is a low-key trip to the park, clearly written with a lot of love for both the setting and the activity, and supplemented with lovely photos of the park and the birds. I was pretty engaged in the activity of finding all the out-of-the-way corners of the park and felt a bit of excitement whenever I came across a new bird to record. There’s a wide variety of birds to be found; it seemed like quite a lot for one trip, but I don’t know how much of a break from reality this is or isn’t.

At the end, I was a little disappointed that the game didn’t give me any indication of how many of the available birds I had found, but of course that wouldn’t be realistic, so from a simulation perspective I see why it doesn’t, even if it does have the effect of discouraging replays.

My only serious complaint is that the image file sizes are huge, making it somewhat irritating to play the game online as they’re slow to load. I think the image quality could be reduced somewhat without the difference being particularly noticeable to most people, and since to the best of my knowledge the majority of people prefer to play online, especially for Twine games, I feel the tradeoff would be worth it. But otherwise, this was a nice, relaxing medium-length game.