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.