In Natsume’s latest simulation game (simply called Afrika), you play a wildlife photographer on the job in the great continent of Africa. Clients send you requests for certain shots (“I’d like a picture of a zebra yawning, please”) and it falls to you to brave the elements and the animals to get the best shots possible.

Photo sims are always fun for me, but Afrika is fantastic. The developers teamed up with National Geographic on all the visual and behavioral aspects of the game, making it both beautiful and informative. All of the backgrounds and animals look strikingly realistic — sometimes I would catch a movement that looked off and remember I was watching a video game, but in general it was like watching a documentary.

I was very impressed by how much you can learn about African wildlife just by playing this sim. There are five basic locations in it that correspond to the majority of the land in Africa: swamps, deserts, steppes, lakes and plains. Each animal in the game is also in its proper habitat (i.e., no alligators in the desert) and interacts with other animals according to its real-life behavior. I got to see two baby elephants playing in a puddle of mud while the matriarch of their heard sniffed the air with her massive trunk when the jeep and photographer approached.

I also got to watch the photographer scramble into his jeep and try to flee when said matriarch decided he got too close and started charging. See? Realism.

Afrika was created so that a person of any skill level can play, meaning you can make the photography as simple or complex as you want. Since this will be released on a Sony platform, Sony also teamed up with the developers to create a huge list of in-game models of actual cameras and lenses to choose from. All of your shots are graded based on composition, proximity to the subject, various techniques (think three-quarter rule) and angle. After completing a certain number of jobs or getting certain, special shots, you unlock actual video and still footage from the vaults of National Geographic. All of these come with information on the animals and locales contained in them, which is another fun way to learn.

Afrika will be released for PlayStation 3 this August. Because of the varying levels of difficulty and informative but entertaining subject matter, I imagine that this game would be great for kids and adults from age 8 and up. Animals do get eaten, but there’s no gore to be seen. This is a game that I’m really excited for; maybe, if I’m a good girl for the rest of the year, Santa will bring me a copy of it and a PS3 for Christmas.