The first bird I saw when I opened Toripon was a small green parakeet sitting on a Roomba vacuum cleaner. I squatted to take a closer look, and the little bird raced past me and into the kitchen. His head turned as if he was looking closer at me. I turned the camera again to follow her and was disturbed and pleased with what I had found: a round bird – purple and gray – waddled with a knife around the kitchen table.
But the bird did not threaten; it just hobbled around and made laps around the small kitchen interior. Ironically, it was not the first time I ever entered an apartment with an animal carrying a gun. Years ago as a dog walker I entered an apartment and the dog was carrying a steak knife around as if it were a dog toy.
These two birds are unlike any I’ve seen as an amateur birdwatcher. These are not the house or the American field sparrows that I see hopping in my garden. Whenever I see birds amusing in front of my windows, I have never seen a bird holding a knife in its hand. Only a dog.
In Toripon, a bird photography game on itch.io, you will find all these little moments. They are paid for by developer Victoria Smith, with additional programming by Zachary Williams, music by Akari Mizusaki and bird voices by Mattias Lahound, and emoji by Dimitry Miroluibov.
(embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2e3hxrjYyw (/ embed)
Toripon is similar to Pokémon Snap, the popular Pokémon photo game released in 1999 for Nintendo 64. Instead of snatching Pokémon, it’s birds – almost 50 different species. The birds are distributed in a colorful, pixelated apartment. (You can turn off pixing if you find it difficult to see them, I’ve done it sometimes.) Sometimes the birds just hang around and do bird things, such as walking. B. swim around in a bathtub. At other times, a whole herd of them is desperately picking on a keyboard as I do all day.
Once you’ve taken a picture, it’s automatically uploaded to the branch’s global social media system, Branch. Here you’ll collect likes and comments on your photos from a group of Toripon’s social media characters, each sending encouraging messages to your photos, such as “cute borb.” It’s a very pure social media form – a world where no one bothers about the sheer amount of animal photos that are published in my feed. Branch also lets you share photos for Twitter. We all agree that the world is pretty annoying at the moment and sometimes you have to look at cute animals.
The apartment in Toripon is not big. It’s easy to go from one side of the place to another in minutes. Even after seeing the apartments and the birds several times, I still felt like exploring – after all, after combing the place, I still lack some birds from my collection. I’ve found that the rarer birds, like the blue duck that I found in my bath, come by accident. So it’s definitely an incentive to get back in the game to check things out.
Toripon feels like a small room with many secrets, and it certainly does not hurt that the secrets are very, very sweet.
