A Bird Story is the follow up to To The Moon, the critically acclaimed game from Freebird Games. Five minutes into the game I looked this up because it feels like a massive step back, but yes, this game was published three years after the original.
The entire game feels like a big step backwards. While To The Moon had problems of limited interaction and linear storytelling, it was a nice 4-5 hour affair of great graphics and a brilliant story.
A Bird Story doesn’t have that. It does try something different in telling a wordless story. Problem is it’s not very interesting and pretty tame. It’s not that it’s predictable, it’s that there is nothing to predict really. The game travels to surrealism quite often, but aside from that, there’s not much here. You go to locations, sometimes there’s an image of things people are requesting and then you find them in the room.
Now a dialogless game sounds interesting, but the player asks “What is he doing now.” Brushing his teeth, getting food, taking off a backpack. It’s all done through 16-bit graphics. Problem is it’s not really clear what the player is doing quite often so I have to ask. This feels like how Final Fantasy especially four and six did cutscenes, but there they had words to add to the scene, or at least had more game so it wasn’t reliant only on that feature. Here, the only feature is the wordless animations.
In fact, as I played the game I often questioned “can I move” as the game sometimes takes control away from you suddenly. Luckily the game always shows the arrow keys quickly when you can move, sadly, it feels like more of the game could have been more interactive or asked more of me. Yet at the same time, less of the game could be interactive. If this was just an hour long animation, it probably would be as impactful. Well… reach the same level of impact.
The thing is the game tries to be innovative, and I’m not against that, but it also should try to be great, and it falls short. The game only lasted about an hour, and I got bored of it really fast. Where I LOVED To The Moon’s story, I felt very little here. Innovation is only good when it’s successful. No one should be applauding the guy who built an automated car that falls apart or crashes quickly. A Bird Story isn’t broken… it’s just not very entertaining and both too short and too long.
I remember when I played Thirty Flights of Loving and HATED the game, just loathed it. A Bird Story is better than Thirty Flights of Loving, it has great graphics, great music, and an attempt at a powerful story. It just falls far shorter than what I would be able to recommend. It has all the same problems. Expensive price for the length, and poor gameplay.
However, A Bird Story has one more problem. While it has great graphics. I sit here in front of a 4k television and it tried to show me the game in a box that took up less than 40 percent of the screen when full screened. The solution is to put it in windowed mode, but even then it’s still not filling up the screen, and caused another problem with the sound. The graphics still were small, and that kind of sucked. According to the developer, it’s a problem with RPG Maker XP. Ok but still a decent ding against the game.
I really want to see the art of the game and get entranced by the story, but it didn’t happen, and at the end of the day, there are far better games out there. I don’t hate Freebird games, I loved To The Moon, I just didn’t like this one. The good news is their next game. Finding Paradise is out and that is a longer game and more like To The Moon.
But A Bird Story is just not a game I’ll recommend, even to people who want just “Story-based games”. It’s not a broken game, but not a game worth playing. However if you haven’t played To The Moon, you should go get that instead. That game is still brilliant.
If this review has helped you or you want to see what games I would recommend, you can find my curator page at this link.
http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Revi... 1.0