Birding in Pope Lick Park

This was a pleasant game. It has a goal it sets out to achieve and does it in a descriptive, polished, and entertaining way.

This game is a simulated bird-watching expedition in Pope Lick Park in Kentucky. It looks quite a bit like the parks near me in Dallas.

The highlight of the game for me is the high-quality photography of birds and other parts of nature. The framing of the photos, the resolution, and the colors were all really appealing to me. The description of the trails and woods occasionally felt a bit repetitive but had enough variety to keep my attention for a while.

Overall, a great game for encouraging people to get into birding. Makes me want to rememeber to take pictures when I see something cool in nature!

This is a pretty eye-catching game that has a really nice visual design.

The first thing I noticed is that it clearly uses icons to differentiate observable things, in-game locations, and external websites. This approach goes a long way in making the game navigable.

It feels more like navigating a website than a real place, but it’s helpful anyway — navigation is something I often have trouble with in Twine games.

Despite a good basic design, there’s also a lot content on-screen at any given time. You have the core story text, photographs of each location, and non-toggleable image descriptions for accessibility. So it can feel like information overload at times.

How much you enjoy the game probably depends on how much you enjoy collecting things in games. It’s not really my thing. (Outside of IF, I thought that the highly-praised Alba: A Wildlife Adventure was very overrated, and I’ve never tried to remotely complete a Pokedex in Pokemon. Collecting and cataloguing is something I’m prone to in real life, and I don’t want to do it in games.)

So, in the end, I didn’t try to see every single bird in Pope Lick Park, and I don’t know if there’s a reward for completing your list of birds or any secrets to find. That’s for someone else to find out.

As for length: the story description says it’s half an hour long, but you can spend as little or as much time in the game as you like. To end the story, you just need to go back to your car.

Similar to “Turn Right,” this seems to be based on a real life experience. Unlike “Turn Right,” “Birding” presents things as they are without much criticism or commentary, and the author describes a lot of things that you might notice incidentally in a walk through the park. However, the author of “Birding” mentions a storywriting workshop in the credits, so maybe there is more fiction here than I’m giving credit for.

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.

Sometimes a game’s title tells you exactly what you’re going to get. And so it is in this choice-based nature simulator, as you take a gentle stroll through nature to look for noteworthy avians while your tongue gently caresses Leo the Great.

If I wasn’t out of the Church before, that gag would earn an excommunication – sorry not sorry, as the kids say. No, as best I can tell from a bit of wiki-diving, the place got its name because some guy in Louisville named Pope had some salt licks on his riverside property. What the park loses in nominative exoticism it gains in natural beauty, at least according to the copious pictures (the author’s own) illustrating the game. It’s nothing fancy – there’s a bridge, some water, soccer fields, paths, grass, and trees – but I found it a pleasant place to make a virtual visit, especially since I’ve been living under a 105-degree heat dome for the past week. Oh, and there are birds, which are the whole point of the exercise!

The protagonist isn’t characterized by anything other than their love of birdwatching, which means the game presupposes that when you wander the park, you won’t want to spend time striking up conversations or kicking a ball around or getting exercise, and instead will have eyes and ears alert for feathered friends. I confess that this isn’t a hobby that’s ever appealed to me, but the author does a good job articulating why one might enjoy it. In each location you visit, you’ll get a sprinkling of flavor text setting the scene, an attractive photo (with thoughtfully-provided alt text), and a prompt to look closer and possibly spot a new bird. If you do, you’re rewarded with another nice pic of the avian in question, and a compact description of what’s uniquely interesting about this one in particular. Here’s one I liked:

"Looking through your binoculars, maybe 50 feet away you spot a bird walking head-first down a tree trunk…. A White-breasted Nuthatch. You love these goofy birds. You listen closely and hear the quiet “ha ha” sound it makes as it searches for bugs living in the bark. It flies from tree to tree, sometimes going up, sometimes upside down on the bottom of a horizontal branch."

And that’s it, that’s the game. You’re using a birding app – the game provides an external link to it if you’d like to download it yourself – which allows you to track what you’ve seen, and the game provides a quick summary once you decide you’ve had enough and leave the park, but there’s no checklist, no goals beyond the intrinsic ones of enjoying a walk and looking at as many different birds as you can find. There are a whole lot of them, from swallows to hawks to cardinals to vultures, and even as a layman I was impressed by the variety. The game’s also designed to be non-deterministic; sometimes you’ll revisit an area you’d been to previously and see that some new birds have taken up residence, which makes things feel less like an exercise in lawn-mowering. The often-confusing layout of the park also reduces any perceived gaminess – I found it hard to keep track of where I’d already been, and how different paths connected, which was frustrating at first but eventually I unclenched my jaw and just went with the flow.

So yeah, there’s nothing here that isn’t said on the tin. And unfortunately this isn’t a game that plays nicely on mobile – the bird pictures displayed for me at a super high resolution that drastically reduced the zoom and somehow blanked out most of the links. But if you’re at all interested in what birders see in their objects of obsession, you could do a lot worse than spending a few minutes with this grounded, low-key experience.

As an elementary birder, this game was an unexpected delight. The writing and presentation is like a virtual tour, so the experience almost felt like going on a birdwalk with the author, who included photos, image descriptions, relevant links, and the thought process behind bird identification. It's edu-tainment, and a nice introduction for anyone who's interested in the hobby. My only suggestion is that it would've been cool to include a link to all the species observed at the end of the game, and to include audio files for the observations that were heard, but not seen.

My favorite part was how well the author captured the peaceful, exploratory nature of birding. The player is invited to meander along whatever paths they choose while life flows around them--- brief interactions with other strangers enjoying their day, passing observations of the people around them. It's a perfectly relaxing Saturday morning out in nature.