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.
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.