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!

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 15 Sep 2024.

This is a charming game where you take a short walk around a park, immersing yourself in the countryside, while looking out for birds and learning about them.

I really like the textual descriptions for the images of the birds and locations. Even with images turned off in the browser (which i tried as a check) it makes the game playable for people who can’t see pictures.

I also liked the in game links to external resources about where you are exploring. All real places, and by following the links you can learn more about them.

Best of all for me was encountering lots of different birds. Extremely different birds from those I’m used to in Scotland. For example an American Robin looks dramatically different from a British Robin. The game teaches you about the birds in the game in a fun yet educational way, while also giving you a relaxing virtual experience out in the countryside.

On the downside the game has issues on smaller screens. I was playing on my laptop, using the downloaded version in my Mac Safari browser, which was fine. My husband - an extremely enthusiastic birder - had tried the game earlier on his iPad mini, but the very large resolution images blew up massively on the screen, meaning that the rest of the user interface was unusable. Another reviewer has mentioned this problem. But it did mean that I knew to use a computer.

That aside I found it a charming and educational experience. I felt as though I had been exploring a new area and spotting and learning about birds. Which was fun.

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.