Birdseed is a cozy, free-to-play game about photographing silly birds. And trying the Early Access release, I simply love it.
Games are so often obsessed with spectacle, which is paradoxically one of the reasons I so dearly appreciate Birdseed. This gentle game about watching and photographing comically cute birds doesn’t shout or overstimulate you. Instead, it invites you to relax, slow down, and simply enjoy a peaceful slice of nature filled with charming, delightfully curious birds.
After my first hands-on session with the Early Access release, I found myself returning over and over, not just to satisfy daily objectives and collect more in-game currency, but to simply exist, to listen to music or the sounds of nature, to hang out and shoot some photos of my hilarious birdbrained pals.
Serious Photography?
As someone who’s been a photographer for over 20 years, and a writer covering the camera industry for more than a decade, I was especially interested in how Birdseed, a game about photographing birds, handles the art and craft of photography.
While I personally love mechanical cameras and the extreme nuance of making a picture with a dedicated camera, adjusting aperture and shutter speed, ISO, and reading all about the finer points of depth-of-field and circle of confusion and other photography nonsense that most of the humans on Earth have never heard about, I understand that highly technical simulations of making pictures don’t always make for a good gaming experience. For most people, serious photography is obtuse and opaque and boring.
Birdseed sidesteps that by being incredibly simple. You can’t move very far. In fact, you stand (or sit) in just a small central viewpoint from where the whole of your observation and photographing occur. You hold a camera, and that camera has just two controls: It can zoom in and out, and it can take a picture. That’s it (for now). There are unlockable lenses of different focal lengths that can be interchanged, and future updates will likely bring art lenses and special effect filters and all of that good stuff. But for now, we’re basically using a point-and-shoot, a type of camera that works as its name suggests. Point it at something, shoot, and a picture comes out.
The simplicity of gameplay is beautiful, and perfect for a game that’s trying to do what Birdseed is trying to do. That is, put a camera in your hand, and give you something to point it at.
The environment is far from photorealistic, but it still manages to be lush and pretty, presented with artfully-crafted cartoonish simplicity. A pastel sun creeps low across a distant mountain range. Marshmallow clouds drift across the azure sky. Sparkling water dances down a falls while towering evergreens sway in the breeze. And within this beautiful nature scape flit birds of all sorts.
They dance among the branches, preen on the rocks, and soar high in the sky. And they look absolutely stupid (complimentary). They’re goofy and silly, delightfully plump and bouncy. Their enormous eyes blink dumbly as they flutter and squawk and bounce. Even when diving on the wind, they look more like bowling pins than sleek products of a million years’ evolution. I love these dumb birds.
The Decisive Moment
You have twelve pictures per day, as you’re using a film camera, and these images are instantly ejected to be held, looked at, and then stored automatically in your photo album. Photos are rated for their content, as well as for the rarity of the bird, and the bird’s poses or actions are marked as well. Capturing a rare bird or a bird in a rare action or pose will rate higher, and higher ratings or achieving certain challenges (for example, photographing a specific type of bird or making a three-star photo) will earn in-game currency which can be spent to buy new lenses and cosmetic items, such as new skins for your camera.
The scarcity of available photos per day is an interesting mechanic, and one that I appreciate. As happens in real life when we’re shooting a film camera, the knowledge that we only have a limited number of shots tends to change the way we photograph. It forces me to pause for a moment, or to think deeper during the act of making an image. Do I really want to use a frame to make this photo? The result is that I either make better pictures, or sometimes I miss out. I found the same thing happening in Birdseed.
Exhausting your daily supply of film doesn’t necessarily mean the play session is over. You can still hang out in the environment, watch birds, and enjoy the scenery. There’s even a radio with which you can listen to some chill tunes.
If there’s one major strike against Birdseed, it’s that the game is not technically solid. During my play sessions, there were several instances of the game crashing. Restarting my Quest 3S smoothed things out temporarily, but a few more crashes led me to uninstall and reinstall Birdseed, which seemed to mostly solve the problem.
For now, and when it works without crashing, I’m enjoying every minute that I spend in Birdseed. Though those minutes amount to just about 30 per day, it’s a nice half hour in VR. Birdseed has been a lovely experience that will surely only become more endearing, fully-fledged, and enjoyable when the game officially releases in March.
Birdseed VR is out now in Early Access on Quest 3 and 3S, with the full release coming in March on Quest and Steam.
