A few months ago the DS saw the release of the first game to try that idea, with Ubisoft's Imagine: Babyz. And while the gameplay of that title fell short, the visual presentation at least kept things relatively comfortable by presenting its human children in a stylized, cartoony form. Baby Pals isn't so lucky. This second digital babysitting design on the DS is more playable than Ubisoft's product was, but it's also much more disturbing – its babies are meant to look realistic, but instead come across as vacant and eerie.
You won't want to spend too much time staring into his or her lifeless eyes, even when you're beginning the game and choosing, from a customization menu, what color those eyes should be. And what skin tone, head size and body dimensions they should have. You can make your pick of gender, too, though the choice seems to be mostly arbitrary – the selection doesn't affect the baby's body at all, only minor aspects of its face.
Gender issues are also where Baby Pals makes itself even more unappealing, and, worse, inappropriate, because two of the game's mini-game designs display your virtual child completely nude on the screen. Imagine: Babyz at least had the sense to obscure its babies' nether regions creatively to facilitate the inclusion of a diaper-changing mini-game design. But here, no such attempt is made – you're left with a completely exposed (though, thankfully, anatomically incorrect) child that's closest equivalent must be something like handing your son a naked Barbie doll.
It's such a confusing and questionable inclusion that that element alone would give me pause in recommending Baby Pals to anyone. And there's an E rating on the box? Even more odd to make sense of.
The rest of the Baby Pals experience is more tame. You can, aside from playing the "take a bath" and "change the diaper" mini-games, also choose from a variety of other childcare activities. There's feeding. There's teaching. There's playing with toys, and there's lulling your baby to sleep.
Feeding plays out like a lite version of Cooking Mama or Imagine: Master Chef, in that you first prepare a variety of simple dishes like Pureed Bananas or Apple Rice Pudding by slicing, mixing and blending ingredients and then sit your kiddo down in a high chair to spoon it into their mouth. Ever played "Airplane" with a hungry baby that wasn't cooperating with your attempts to feed them? There you go. That's the idea.
Teaching is the way to make progress, of sorts, through the "adventure" of Baby Pals – most of the mode is locked in the beginning, but over time you're allowed to begin teaching your youngster to distinguish between different colors, crawl, walk, and the like. It's a fair design, too, though it may give you some trouble if you have difficulty distinguishing between different colors yourself.
Playing with toys is probably the most basic, as you just hold different objects in front of the kid and wait for him or her to grab at them. And you've got a patty cake design that plays out like a game of Simon, a simple implementation of Peek-a-boo that you can see a screen of up above, and a design wherein you guide little cartoon sheep through a garden in order to help your baby go to bed.
All of these elements together end up working well, and none are plagued with the touch screen unresponsiveness that the similar mini-games of Imagine: Babyz had. So Baby Pals would be, overall, the more playable and less frustrating of the two.
But it really all comes back to the disturbing elements of presentation in the end, because they're unavoidable as you continue playing. Your baby has Needs meters, one of which is Cleanliness, so you'll be forced to play the mini-games featuring the disturbing, inappropriate nudity over and over again as you continue with the title. And those lifeless, ever-staring eyes never let up either – they pierce your very soul with their persistence, even popping back open immediately after a successful completion of the "go to sleep" mini-game. Disturbing, disturbing, disturbing.
