Not since Virginia have I felt that I was wasting my time playing a video game from the very beginning as I did with A Bird Story. This title has been marketed as a major miniature release in the To the Moon franchise, acting as a transitionary point between the first and second entries. And yet, if I hadn’t been told that, there is no way that I would have known. A Bird Story isn’t quite a misfire, but nor is it experimental: it’s another substandard, overly-cinematic excuse for a video game that should be looked upon as an example of what NOT to do in indie game design.
You’re supposedly given the ability to move around like in TTM, but I’d say the game only unlocks that about 50% of the time. The other 50% you’re forced to watch mini-cutscenes of an abysmal narrative that I’ll tear into in a little bit.
99 percent of this movement is just basic UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT, though that 1% comes up in the form of gimmicks that are too short-lived to be impactful. TTM didn’t have much in the way of gameplay either, but at least the story was intriguing, and exploration was encouraged. That latter part isn’t available here because you’re essentially on rails: trying to go off the straightforward path will land you against a brick wall, forcing you to backtrack and go back the way the game wants you go.
Aesthetically, A Bird Story is a mixed bag. It reuses a lot of the assets from TTM and the RPG Maker engine, but TTM was a beautiful game, and so that was far from being a bad tactic. Unfortunately, the limited environs here (a schoolground, apartment complex, and forested area) are laced with copy/pasted models (same-sized shadow figures, same-exact trees, same-exact lamps) ad nauseam. The biggest problem, though, is this weird filter that is placed over most of the game: it’s like halfway between sepia and bleach bypass. I’m guessing it was Freebird’s attempt at conceiving a unique “old-timey” feel to their storyline, but I didn’t think it fit personally due to the timeline being relatively modern.
Another graphical issue is the poor depiction of verticality. This is an inherent issue with 2D sprite games, and TTM suffered from it occasionally as well. But here, I felt that the problem was a lot more prevalent in the three places, with barriers not being distinguishable enough from regular pathways. That being said, one thing A Bird Story does remarkably effectively is combine the three places in fused sets that occur as a result of memories/dates getting combined in-story; you’ll see the schoolgrounds leading into forests, apartment doors opening into rainy exteriors, and so forth. Freebird also continues to demonstrate their ability to create unique facial expressions out of small sprite countenances, (though the smiling closed/curved eyelines was overused).
Sadly, I do have to end on a bitter note in this department, and that is regarding the constant use of white and black flashes. I get that this was done to depict time-skips and fast-forwards, but I couldn’t help but feel that, half the time, it was also done because the devs didn’t want to commit a huge budget to the project and so wanted to avoid animating sequences. But I fully concede that that is pure conjecture on my part. Either way, they were overused. Shortcuts were also taken like the lack of shadowmapping and no splashes (characters, in general, look like they’re floating on the land).
I was not a fan of the score. Gao did it himself again, yet the first half of the game incorporates these weird warble experimentations that distract rather than contribute to the scenes playing before you (the use of muted instruments, for example, or French Horns that hit notes so high they near-burst speakers). The second half is more restrained and standard, and yet that’s a bad thing because it both doesn’t stand out AND doesn’t contribute to the images at large. Flying around in your paper airplane, for example, should’ve elicited the same awe as John William’s track in ET during the bike scene.
The SFX is also barren. The exact same chirp is rehashed for your avian companion, and other things like footsteps and ambient noises are nonexistent. No dialogue means no voice acting (not that TTM had any, a big fault on its part).
Finally, we arrive at the story, and it’s such a misfire. You remember that episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody where Cody adopts a baby eagle? Imagine that turned completely serious and stretched out for an entire hour+ and you have A Bird Story. It’s actually worse than that: take that premise and combine it with a cliché tale of a loser kid with estranged parents becoming extroverted via a newfound friendship and you have A Bird Story.
Forgive me, but at this point I’m just tired of this archetypal narrative. We’ve seen it done with humans and animals alike a bazillion times, and Freebird doesn’t do anything different here. Thankfully, it doesn’t go into tearjerker territory, however there are blatant attempts at being heart-tugging and I just found it annoying. It’s quite possible to tell a moving story about a relationship using just imagery and music (Up and BvS’s openings are prime standards of this), but Freebird botched things here by over-relying on hackneyed tropes and story beats. The magical realism aspects aren’t bad, but it doesn’t amount to anything substantial or memorable courtesy of the aforestated weak OST and gameplay. Alongside, there are these odd momentary throwbacks to classic games/shows (Zelda, Spongebob, Mario, Scooby-Doo), and the comedic tones associated with them feel out-of-place with the drama elsewhere.
So yeah, it goes without saying that I wasn’t a fan of A Bird Story. Every single facet of it bore a noticeable problem, with its core narrative, in particular, being flawed. I have to play Finding Paradise to see just how integral it is to understanding that game, but I have a good feeling that it won’t be. It took me a little over an hour to beat the game, making the $4.00 asking price too much. Regardless, even if it was one dollar, the fact that I felt a one-hour game dragged says enough.
You’re supposedly given the ability to move around like in TTM, but I’d say the game only unlocks that about 50% of the time. The other 50% you’re forced to watch mini-cutscenes of an abysmal narrative that I’ll tear into in a little bit.
99 percent of this movement is just basic UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT, though that 1% comes up in the form of gimmicks that are too short-lived to be impactful. TTM didn’t have much in the way of gameplay either, but at least the story was intriguing, and exploration was encouraged. That latter part isn’t available here because you’re essentially on rails: trying to go off the straightforward path will land you against a brick wall, forcing you to backtrack and go back the way the game wants you go.
Aesthetically, A Bird Story is a mixed bag. It reuses a lot of the assets from TTM and the RPG Maker engine, but TTM was a beautiful game, and so that was far from being a bad tactic. Unfortunately, the limited environs here (a schoolground, apartment complex, and forested area) are laced with copy/pasted models (same-sized shadow figures, same-exact trees, same-exact lamps) ad nauseam. The biggest problem, though, is this weird filter that is placed over most of the game: it’s like halfway between sepia and bleach bypass. I’m guessing it was Freebird’s attempt at conceiving a unique “old-timey” feel to their storyline, but I didn’t think it fit personally due to the timeline being relatively modern.
Another graphical issue is the poor depiction of verticality. This is an inherent issue with 2D sprite games, and TTM suffered from it occasionally as well. But here, I felt that the problem was a lot more prevalent in the three places, with barriers not being distinguishable enough from regular pathways. That being said, one thing A Bird Story does remarkably effectively is combine the three places in fused sets that occur as a result of memories/dates getting combined in-story; you’ll see the schoolgrounds leading into forests, apartment doors opening into rainy exteriors, and so forth. Freebird also continues to demonstrate their ability to create unique facial expressions out of small sprite countenances, (though the smiling closed/curved eyelines was overused).
Sadly, I do have to end on a bitter note in this department, and that is regarding the constant use of white and black flashes. I get that this was done to depict time-skips and fast-forwards, but I couldn’t help but feel that, half the time, it was also done because the devs didn’t want to commit a huge budget to the project and so wanted to avoid animating sequences. But I fully concede that that is pure conjecture on my part. Either way, they were overused. Shortcuts were also taken like the lack of shadowmapping and no splashes (characters, in general, look like they’re floating on the land).
I was not a fan of the score. Gao did it himself again, yet the first half of the game incorporates these weird warble experimentations that distract rather than contribute to the scenes playing before you (the use of muted instruments, for example, or French Horns that hit notes so high they near-burst speakers). The second half is more restrained and standard, and yet that’s a bad thing because it both doesn’t stand out AND doesn’t contribute to the images at large. Flying around in your paper airplane, for example, should’ve elicited the same awe as John William’s track in ET during the bike scene.
The SFX is also barren. The exact same chirp is rehashed for your avian companion, and other things like footsteps and ambient noises are nonexistent. No dialogue means no voice acting (not that TTM had any, a big fault on its part).
Finally, we arrive at the story, and it’s such a misfire. You remember that episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody where Cody adopts a baby eagle? Imagine that turned completely serious and stretched out for an entire hour+ and you have A Bird Story. It’s actually worse than that: take that premise and combine it with a cliché tale of a loser kid with estranged parents becoming extroverted via a newfound friendship and you have A Bird Story.
Forgive me, but at this point I’m just tired of this archetypal narrative. We’ve seen it done with humans and animals alike a bazillion times, and Freebird doesn’t do anything different here. Thankfully, it doesn’t go into tearjerker territory, however there are blatant attempts at being heart-tugging and I just found it annoying. It’s quite possible to tell a moving story about a relationship using just imagery and music (Up and BvS’s openings are prime standards of this), but Freebird botched things here by over-relying on hackneyed tropes and story beats. The magical realism aspects aren’t bad, but it doesn’t amount to anything substantial or memorable courtesy of the aforestated weak OST and gameplay. Alongside, there are these odd momentary throwbacks to classic games/shows (Zelda, Spongebob, Mario, Scooby-Doo), and the comedic tones associated with them feel out-of-place with the drama elsewhere.
So yeah, it goes without saying that I wasn’t a fan of A Bird Story. Every single facet of it bore a noticeable problem, with its core narrative, in particular, being flawed. I have to play Finding Paradise to see just how integral it is to understanding that game, but I have a good feeling that it won’t be. It took me a little over an hour to beat the game, making the $4.00 asking price too much. Regardless, even if it was one dollar, the fact that I felt a one-hour game dragged says enough.