Birthdays the Beginnings is a sandbox adventure from Harvest Moon creator

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Due March next year.

Birthdays the Beginnings is the next project from Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada, set to land on PC on March 7 in North America and March 10 in Europe next year. 

It's been over 20 years since Wada's flagship farming simulator arrived on the Super Nintendo, and while this year's hugely popular Stardew Valley has since bridged the digital agriculture gap for PC players, Wada's latest gig will be "very different" from the Story of Seasons debut. 

Billed as a "sandbox game in which players create cube-shaped worlds that give rise to diverse and unique lifeforms," players will experiment with geographical planning and temperature setting as they "witness the birth of an entire ecosystem." 

With that, you play god in crafting a living world from the ground up—"from single-celled organisms to complex multicellular life, including plants, mammals, dinosaurs, and more"—which does seem to echo certain aspects of Harvest Moon. 

"I would say that it would be inaccurate to say that we went from Harvest Moon to Birthdays the Beginning," said Wada during a Reddit AMA, however. "For Birthdays, this is an idea that I've always had from a very young age. (I was inspired by a item called "Chikyuu Set" in the Doraemon manga.) The two are very different games, but that being said, since the two games do share the same creator, I think users will find some similarities."

Yesterday, publisher NIS America streamed sections of the game in its current state alongside Wada—archived here—before revealing March 7 and 10, 2017 as Birthdays the Beginnings' North American and European respective launch dates.

Joe Donnelly
Deputy Editor, PC Gaming Show