Desktop Meadow lets you cultivate a soothing garden filled with cheerful animals and bright flowers. Perhaps our files were the viruses all along?
It feels nice to personalize our work and play spaces. Throw up some plushies or posters or pictures or figurines and these sterile working spaces feel just enough like home that you feel more comfortable in them. It makes the work you do feel a bit more welcoming. Still, beyond a background or tacky screensaver, how much do you usually personalize your computer? Maybe you make the files into neat shapes, though. Maybe your file names spell out a song. I don’t know. But does your desktop hide a pleasant garden for birds to visit?
This game brings you some delightful bird friends as you go about your work day. Pretty nice considering the grim, dull things occupying most work computers. These little feathered pals will flit about, landing on flowers and bringing a bit of color and joy throughout your day. It’s kind of like daydreaming while looking out the window, but the boss is far less likely to catch you. Seems like a pretty solid deal.
Desktop Meadow also looks to bring you together with your fellow pixel bird watchers. You can write letters of support to random other players enjoying the game’s world, or you might receive some yourself. It creates a loving connection to one’s computer, exploring these coded spaces that take up so much of our lives. Much like the work of Nathalie Lawhead, it delves into the pieces of ourselves that exist in these computer spaces, and how these machines end up feeling so much more human through the emotions and actions we bring to them.
Desktop Meadow is available now on itch.io.
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