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.

This is probably my own fault, honestly, that I'm not particularly invested in the idea of being drip fed onion games/love de lic's titular bits and pieces through a shmup gamification. Not to say it isn't aware of its genre framework at all, it clearly encourages that destruction by locking those chapters behind score and your increasing finesse. And to be sure it makes interesting choices that all mellowly bleed off the screen, with such nicely matching music and enemies spawning to the swells of the music! But it's just so not for me, a limitation of my taste I suppose. I shrill up and detest most concepts of having to go through art that repeats on itself, so when I first started true mode and finished the first level again that was just the Same But Harder in a typical over-evolving shmup fashion without me being so particularly invested in the aesthetic beyond a subliminal note, I just kind of said no and closed the game. Sounds a bit hypocritical of me though when I think about it and I can't personally place the reason why, yet, but in examples like say ZeroRanger which literally loops i'm fine if not ecstatic over it! I think it has to do with a change in energy, or maybe I'm getting too old for picture book lighthearted destruction, or that well, I didn't think it getting Much Harder was even particularly that hard at all.

Maybe something that'll appreciate in time but I get the feeling that this is just a comfort food's rendition of what people like about love de lic style, and that I'll forget about it by the end of next week. That's probably too harsh and critical of me, and god this game really doesn't ask to be considered much so I feel like an asshole just saying it, but I'm just,,,, really not interested in this kind of direction!!! Arguably considerably sound to drip feed the appeal for its structure but it pains me that I can't think of anything other than "maybe black bird should've actually showed a more bold first step forward than ask me to play again to really play the true thing".

idk shit about shmups and im not particularly good at this one, but this is a fantasy zone-ish take on it that's pretty cool. onion games hides a surprising amt of secrets and finesse in their stuff and this is no exception, the enjoyment for me comes from finding little hidden things that can help, experimenting to figure it out, without necessarily losing an arcadey familiarity at its core. here it translates to an ultraviolent romp with morose flashes of rule of rose, the premise essentially speaks for itself without words. i wasnt compelled to keep going bc of a gripping story or anything but to see what else the game would bring and to try to have better runs; you should beat it at least once to unlock true mode, if you can make it that far (its not a particularly long game), because it will have more to offer if you are interested enough to master it.

special shoutout to hirofumi taniguchi whose soundtrack in this is his best since chibi robo imo. my favorite composer in games not just because his compositions are great and fit the games aesthetically, but because in his best work he shows that he thinks about how the game world interacts with music. his vetting of indie musicians for moon and giftpia, his variations on one theme for chulip, clear most of all with his musical sfx for chibi robo, all show this consideration for the player perceiving sound/music in relation to how they express themselves, unique to each case. black bird is similarly clever about this, even when its actually that the soundtrack came before the game, with enemy spawns and projectiles firing to the beat of taniguchi's musical flourishes. its a cool way of helping you to expect attacks in runs while having your positioning be crucial as to how it happens so its not completely rote memorization, and its my favorite touch of this game.

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.

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!

Black Bird is an absurdly brief experience. Even by the standards of STGs, even getting down to the fastest things in the arcade and shitpost doujin shooters that scroll faster than the eye can see, Black Bird is extremely short. You get a whole 4 Levels of gameplay here, each of which probably not reasonably taking you more than 3-4 minutes. It's also a pretty easy game and whilst there is a "True Mode" which is harder and has secret endings and stuff, practically, if you've played an STG before, this is an experience that's over in 15 minutes. If you get this at full price and play it once, it's more than a dollar a minute!

So it's a good job Black Bird is a pretty wonderful experience. A Surreal Horror/Fantasy shooter which essentially lifts the template of Sega Classic fantasy zone to create a game where you, as the wrathful spirit of a dead girl reincarnated as an elrich black bird, wreak havoc through the world into it's far future.

And it really works. The levels are beautifully detailed and fun to tear apart, killing countless of Onion Games/Love de lic's cute little characters in the process. The visuals are fantastic, with great use of (what i think is) digitized sprites, heavy post processing and great animation - which combines with a fantastic, creepy ost to make for a very eerie experience.

Black bird is simultaneously cute, funny, and pretty creepy. It's a very open ended story that is more metaphor than anything concrete, as is illustrated in it's 8 endings, all of which basically consist of "different things this game could have meant".

It's particularly interesting to see a game come from some of the same staff as Moon to revel in death and destruction of a society that has wronged people, and almost make it comedic. I wouldn't call it outright misanthropic, more a cathartic fantasy n revenge and the power of grief. But idk maybe i'm talking out my ass.

Most weirdly of all, it's actually fairly good as a shmup, which is not something i expected. It's formula is basically fantasy zone - take out all the bases on a level and then a boss, but the fantastic level design, an interesting scoring system which the game encourages you to explore by locking the endings behind it. The game is still fairly easy even on true difficulty, and it's definetly not something that's intended to be mained as a shmup, but it is pretty engaging for those into scoring, and the way it uses music queues to spawn enemy locations wherever you are on the stage gives it a bit more in the way of interesting encounters than Fantasy Zone - fantasy zone itself being one of the finer STGs of the 80s, and i'd say this exceeds that at the very least.

So yeah, I think this is good. An amazing 15 minutes of surreal fantasy horror opera. Problem is, it's 15 minutes and when I, someone who will gladly import overpriced STGs from Japan all the time, think it's pushing it's pricepoint, it's definetly going to be too much for most people. As of time of writing it's on sale for £7.50, which for me is about right, but I know for many it is still pushing it.

Still, it's a 15 minutes worth experiencing, if you can.