Review: Panda Rescue
This #VoiceGame is a highlight both in the simulation game and the kids game category, as evidenced by the fact that it was one of the 20 finalists of the Alexa Skills Kids Challenge, and won a bonus prize for the best Alexa Skill designed for Echo Show. Let’s take a deep dive into what makes this game so outstanding.
What’s the game about?
In Panda Rescue you assume the role of a young volunteer at the Panda Wilderness School — A fictional Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, in Wolong, China. As the volunteer, your job is to raise an orphaned baby panda and prepare it for its release into the wild at the age of two years.
This game is subdivided into ten levels, each of which covers a particular stage in your panda’s life, like just being found, learning to eat leafs, starting to climb, learning to avoid predators and so on.
Each level is structured as follows:
- There’s an introduction in which you learn about your panda’s current age and weight, and get some information on the general situation (such as the onset of the rainy season or winter in levels 3 and 6).
- Two or three situations covering lessons that your panda or you yourself have to learn in this level
- Exactly three questions about how you’re handling the situations
- Optionally a panda trivia quiz, in which the chief sanctuary officer interrogates you on your panda caretaker aptitude in case you answered more than one of the questions incorrectly. If you don’t get all three questions of the quiz right, you get a warning and have to repeat the quiz.
- A summary of what you and your panda have learned in this level
Great, you managed to make it sound boring! How can it be an engaging experience to go through these steps at each level?
The structure I just pointed out completely blends into the background of the gaming experience — In fact, I needed to use a spreadsheet to extract this pattern. The actual question is: What makes this game’s narration so rich and diverse?
- A wealth of actual panda content
The game delivers interesting facts about panda life and conservation at a very high rate, and thus creates increases the value of the experience from merely enjoyable to actually educational — Time well spent! - Dense coverage with sound effects
Each scene is richly ‘illustrated’ by sounds of pandas, weather, wildlife, footsteps, panflutes, leafs and such. In many cases, the spoken text uses sound effects as a background layer. - Thematically matching narrator
This #VoiceGame uses an abstract second person point of view (you can read more about different points of views in #VoiceFirst interactive games in my recent article), so in the absence of a narrator character it doesn’t require a custom voice. Yet, by going the extra mile and using the (computer-generated) voice of a girl with an East Asian accent, the game achieves a distinct bonus on immersion! - Non-player characters
As a game whose designated purpose is to educate its players about pandas, it has a lot of information to convey. Instead of leaving all the lecturing to the narrator, some of it is done using non-player characters such as your fellow volunteer Ivy with her Panda Factbook, Raveena the veterinarian, and (Amy, if I’m not mistaken) the chief sanctuary officer. These characters are not very deep or relatable, but they do their job of keeping the gaming experience diverse.
Eyes like conformity, ears like variety — Andrea Muttoni (Amazon Alexa Developer Evangelist)
- Different question types
This is quite subtle, and you probably won’t find a customer review that praises this feature, but we’re on a deep dive for engagement factors, right? :)
As you remember, there are three questions per level, and this harbors some risk of monotony. This risk is mitigated by mixing the types of questions: There are simple yes/no-questions (‘Do panda mothers carry their babies around in their paws?’), single choice questions with two options (‘Do you fix the hole in your panda suit first, or feed your baby panda right away?’), and open questions (‘Which very important thing have you forgotten?’). - Great screen support
The game makes strong use of the Echo Show & Echo Spot’s screen by displaying images of baby pandas whose age corresponds to the current level, as well as the current question and stats. If you don’t have such a device, you can check out the demo video at the game’s devpost page.
Wow, that’s impressive! Now, what makes people play the game again after they finished it once?
You’re asking about the game’s retention ‘hooks’? Yes, it’s got a few of these as well! Let’s continue our examination:
- Emotional connection
As the player, you get to choose the gender and name of your panda, accompany it through various situations, and hear quite a number of sweet squeals and squeaks. By the time you finished the 10 levels, it’s likely that you feel a tiny loss and want to experience that connection again. - Score on a global leaderboard
For each correctly answered questions, you receive points. Those points don’t have any meaning within the game, but at the end it is revealed that they determine your position on a global leaderboard of volunteer panda caretakers. For the competitively-minded, this provides some motivation to try and go for the ‘perfect run’. - Hidden charms
If you answer all three questions of a level correctly, you receive a hidden charm. The number of discovered charms is also displayed on the leaderboard, but more importantly, they appeal to the player’s sense of diligence and completeness. - Habit forming
The game has no built-in mechanism to stretch the gaming experience, e.g. by limiting how much you can play per day. It does encourage both adults and kids to play only one or two levels per day, both on the Skill description page, and after completing a level.
Seems like the game is very strong both in engagement and retention! What’s your conclusion?
The game is quite successful, judging by the game’s number of reviews (39) and its feature rank in the US games subcategory (38) — Its creators Jess Williams and Oscar Merry from Opearlo voice are professionals in this space and got a lot of factors right!
For me personally, the interesting question beyond ‘Which hooks does this game have?’ is this:
What can we learn from this game about how to build complex games without cognitively overburdening the user?
Asking this question elicits a surprising answer: Panda Rescue is actually a quiz game (or a linear interactive story game with only progress nodes) that is so richly ‘decorated’ that it creates the illusion of being a simulation game! That’s pretty fascinating, right?
I’m curious to see what other patterns will emerge when we look at other simulation game. If you know great #VoiceFirst games you think I should analyze, or think I missed something or even got something wrong here with Panda Rescue, please let me know! I hope this review was as helpful and interesting to you as it was to me! :)
