Alba is a game that touches on issues we care deeply about. One of these is our relationship with nature. The goal of the early prototypes was to recreate the feeling of going birdwatching. A lot of iteration has gone into the game since then but a core of it would still be recognisable today. The game has always featured a young girl exploring a small open world and taking photographs of birds. Slowly, as the game fleshed out, Alba started to grow in complexity and size. As a result, it became ...

Even a winter gremlin like myself does, occasionally, miss the sun. Fortunately, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is offering an unseasonable dose of vitamin D with its nostalgic summer holiday. Released this week, Ustwo’s latest is a sweet little island holiday filled with bird-spotting, activism, and restoring some life to this knackered old coastal town. Just mind you pack your sunscreen, kid. (more…)

And it's out there! This is the longest we've spent making a single game. Back in 2018 we didn’t know that this game would turn out like this. Not least of which because nobody expected 2020 would turn out the way it has. What started as a simple exploration to see if we could capture the magic of a birdwatching hike, has become Alba: a Wildlife Adventure, the pre-apocalyptic game some of us sorely need right now. We wanted to take the world we remembered from our summers growing up, and turn it...

UPDATE 4/1/21: In one of the last news stories I wrote back in 2020, I mentioned below how Monument Valley studio Ustwo was planting a tree for every copy of its new game Alba that was either downloaded or sold. Well, a couple of weeks, one broken radiator and several plumber visits later (how was your Christmas break?) there's some good news at least on this front. Ustwo has now said it has ensured over a quarter of a million trees will be planted - 276,490 at the time of writing - which presum...

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is something a bit different for the folks who previously built Monument Valley and Assemble With Care. Alba is a young girl setting out to help restore her island through some environmental activism and good deeds. We’d previously only seen a tiny teaser trailer, but now Ustwo Games have fished out a new trailer to show it off while announcing a December 11th launch date. (more…)