World Tour: The Balearics, Grandparents Included
Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, an imaginary island that feels very familiar. #worldtour #spain #balearicislands #videogame
Welcome back to Artcade, the little bell on the hotel reception counter, the one whose DING snaps your brain back into attention. Hello, good evening, I’m the brain, how may I help you? Well, you should read this new Artcade episode, that’s how you could help me! Sometimes the brain doesn’t catch the obvious, but let’s try to be kind to it: it may be a gigantic gray pudding, but it’s the only one we’ve got. Enjoy the read!
Sometimes I forget Spain isn’t just the chunk of land attached to the continent. If you look closely at the map, you’ll notice two splashes of red: one in the Atlantic and one in the Mediterranean. The Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands. Today we’re landing on an island that’s part of the latter archipelago, off the eastern coast, more or less level with Valencia. We’ll explore a tiny little island that feels like a “best of” the Balearics, including its greatest clichés. Welcome to Alba: A Wildlife Adventure.
It all starts with the developers’ childhood vacations: days at the seaside with their grandparents, etched into memory. The idea behind the game is to recreate exactly that kind of recollection: a week on the imaginary island of Secarral, in the town of Pinar del Mar, between ice cream, the sea, and adventures.
The game puts us in the shoes of a little girl named Alba: at first we see her when she’s tiny, but by the time we take control we’re already old enough to roam the island on our own, and to realize not everything is going great. On the island, everyone’s talking about a plan to build a massive tourist hotel, the kind that would draw hordes of visitors but threatens to destroy the nature reserve. Faced with that prospect, even the multi-story building (the kind of “eco-monster” we’d call it in Italy) towering over the coast starts to look like a well-integrated part of the landscape you might even feel fondness for.
Alba decides to take the problem into her own hands, and this is where we get to the first big realistic element in the game. Not the island. Not the biodiversity. The smartphone.
Alba photographs animals to catalog them, identify them, collect them in a digital bestiary that feels like the eco-friendly version of Pokémon. In a world where your phone usually helps you disappear, here it becomes a pocket field guide, a reason to look around and actually learn the place you’re in. It’s a subversive use case, which is why I suspect there’s already a bill drafted somewhere to make it illegal.
With the only limitation being sunset (and our grandparents waiting for us at home for dinner), every day we’ll discover sunset beaches, orchards with short trees heavy with oranges, the town square, cultivated fields, and all the little details reconstructed with loving precision. In a great article by Jessie van Aelst, one of the environment artists on Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, we learn how many real-world places became part of Secarral’s imaginary island.
Over the seven days of vacation, we won’t roam the island just to take photos. There’s another gesture we’ll find ourselves doing often, a small gesture that still matters: picking up trash. Apparently even video games have their local litterbugs, and we’ll be the island’s superhero, ready to pounce on every disgusting thing people leave behind. And if the idea of cleaning up Secarral isn’t enough for you, know that every time you toss a piece of trash in a bin, the game gives you a little heart: instant moral approval.
As the days go by, our actions start earning the locals’ support, and even the local newspaper notices something is changing.
Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a small game, but it’s meticulous. What it asks of us, attention and care, the developers put into the code: every tiny detail feels dictated by affection. To confirm that, for every copy sold, ustwo games committed to planting a tree. They already passed one million. One more push to save the island, along with all our memories.
ustwo games (2021) [2020] Alba: A Wildlife Adventure [Video game] [Adventure] [2½ hours] (PlayStation 5) [Nintendo Switch, Windows, iOS, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One/Series X/S] ustwo games
My last two coins
I know how this ends. I’m about to start telling some anecdote about my vacations with my grandparents and get emotional. But I have an institutional role here, maybe I should change the subject as fast as possible, talk about environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, the transition to clean energy. Better to pivot to commitment, the future, the legacy we leave to the next generations. These are all serious topics we need to talk about. It’s just that an entire photo album has opened in my head, and it’s full of beautiful images. Never mind. See you next episode, ciao!