Black Bird

released on Oct 18, 2018

This is the tale of a young girl who dies one day on a street corner and is reborn as the ominous Black Bird. Become the calamity, ‘Black Bird’, and destroy the kingdom. Experience the phantom opera in wonderland!


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Sometimes I love a simple little shmup, and Black Bird hits that spot by not being incredibly difficult, not incredibly long, and bringing out some of the best Kimura art direction I've seen so far.
The style is much darker than you might expect, as we're essentially shown the death of a child who's corpse then mutates into a terrible petulant bird that kills people by spitting acid and screeching loud enough to combust organic matter.
How this happened, nobody will know.
There's a lot of playful energy to the darkness, though, and it makes the game feel incredibly unique - especially for a shmup. The pinhole-film style that gradually evolves into steampunk and eventually cyber-bourgoisie(???) absurdity, with some of the same vibes as Kirby's colorful eldritch gods popping out here and there. You can tell the team had a blast drafting up all the little guys and conceptualizing the locales while finding spots to put in little signature flourishes.
The audioscape is just as impressive as the visuals, Kimura even got an opera singer to perform for the soundtrack, which adds such a unique twist to the art direction that it really feels like the bow on top of the whole experience.

Black Bird isn’t a substantial game by any metric, but that doesn’t mean it's not worth your time. There are a lot of games with smaller scope that don’t get a lot of attention because they aren’t the “next big thing.” Most people’s favorite game isn’t a short 30 minute indie game, and I’m not here to say it should be otherwise. But I do think that games with a scope as large as Black Bird’s do get overlooked in favor of something more substantial.

Black Bird is charming to an extent that few games are. I would almost put it up there with games like Earthbound and Katamari Damacy in how charming it is. The pixel art is gorgeous, the color palettes are subdued in a way that makes such vastly different environments feel cohesive to one project. The character designs are as charming as ever, most of Onion Games stuff has a distinct look to it, and it's not absent here. The music is great too, ranging from old classical music, to new tracks in the same vein. It acts as a nice background since so many goofy and wacky sound effects layer over the music.

The gameplay isn’t noteworthy, but it doesn’t have to be. I heard someone recently talking about how Shmups have almost become synonymous with Bullet-Hells, and it really struck me how few Shmups are slower paced. It's refreshing to see something that isn’t as intense in the same genre. It allows the player to focus on the presentation more and fits better with the tone of the game.

I think Black Bird understands that it's not a monolithic title, and it's all the better for it. Onion Games really honed in on what their vision for the game was, and it turned out great.

Kinda short, kinda easy (was 7 seconds away from a 1CC before getting my first game over) but the art and music and atmosphere is good and unique. Would love for more games to adopt this kind of operatic score.

I’m not much into SHMUPs, but this one’s a treasure. The OST and visuals are beautiful and unique, the scoring system is very fun and it has amazing replay value.

super fantasy zone hate mail from a world where shadow is sega's mascot. weird sticky controls that I don't love.

A unique, very charming shmup with a generally great vibe. Clearly designed with scoring in mind, the game’s shorter length facilitates repeat playthroughs in quick succession, allowing for experimentation with the game's various mechanics.
That said, the actual score mechanics are pretty vague and managing the numerous moving parts in each stage means many repeat runs. It’s also pretty easy to get clipped by a stray enemy or enemy bullet (sometimes blending into the busy backgrounds), which can throw off the entire run, but again not particularly a huge deal considering the game's length.
Otherwise the difficulty isn’t bad at all save for the TLB which is a little absurd. I quickly found myself getting hooked despite my initial skepticism. It's sort of a bite-size shmup experience!