A Bird Story

Kan Gao is a fucking prodigy and needs to be recognized as such. Seriously. A Bird Story is a game that lasts an hour, has 16-bit graphics, features no dialogue or text at all, has only one major human character, and is primarily about the relationship between a boy and a bird he finds in a forest. Not a magical bird, not an exotic bird, not even one that can talk; I'm pretty sure its a pigeon.

How does that sound to you? Boring? A bit slight? Maybe pointless? Sure; it does to me, too. So HOW does Gao make this so charming, so moving, so memorable, so beautiful? How does this stand in a field that has literally thousands of short-form games in it and still feel like it's in a class completely of its own? How is it that thousands of other games in this format can touch on obviously emotive, deeply sensitive topics like cancer, mental illness, suicide, and sexual assault, and not capture even a tenth of the emotion or sensitivity that Kan Gao can draw from a boy fixing a bird's wing, or teaching it to play fetch with a paper airplane?

A Bird Story isn't To the Moon, and it doesn't pretend to be. What it is, though, is absolutely glorious, one of the most sweet and genuine experiences I've ever had with a game, and an experience that genuinely made me feel like the world was a better place after I'd finished it. The flying sequence gave me probably the most weirdly thrilling, utterly uplifting feeling I've felt since the the last fifteen minutes of Journey. Games - hell, TV and films and music and books too - do not make me feel like that anywhere near often enough. Kan Gao, apparently, can do it without even really trying. And that's maybe his calling card, the thing that really sticks with me as much as anything about his games - they feel totally effortless. Of course this game was a huge undertaking. Of course drawing out these landscapes and buildings and animating these characters took a huge amount of time. Of course he didn't just conjure this story, which hints at autism and bullying and parental neglect without ever being blunt or heavy-handed about them, out of thin-air - it likely went through several drafts to perfect. But not a single ounce of that effort is felt by the player. This is so easy to drift away with, and if you do, it takes you places that a story on a scale this small has no right to.

If somebody asked me to take a bullet for this guy, I'd consider it.

Das experiências mais inofensivas que eu tive com um jogo. Considerando o tempo de gameplay, deveria ser um F2P bônus de To The Moon.

When it comes to art, choosing the correct medium to express yourself is vital. A story gears itself towards a book format, and if a more visual aspect is required, you can always add pictures to the book. In a game format, you really need something more engaging to the player, giving them at least a minor part to play in the story.

With A Bird Story, all you are required to do is move around and occasionally press Enter or Space Bar to interact with objects. The thing is, there's plenty of times where the computer takes over and you just watch like a cut-scene. What usually happens in these scenes is exactly the same as when you are controlling the character, meaning the entire 'game' could have been something you watch instead.

Further to this, there's not much to the story, meaning the 70 mins it takes to go through it could have been condensed into 30 mins or less; meaning it should really have been an animation.

There is no text or speech to convey the story, meaning a lot of scenes at the start of the game before the boy actually finds the bird are pointless. You see the boy at school, or alone at his flat but there's no context to his relationships or feelings in the world. Maybe he does feel isolated so the bird becomes his best friend, but it's basically just guesswork.

The story seems to be told through the boy's memories. The world he lives in seems dream-like because most people are represented as ghostly shadows, and the world often just morphs as he travels. He may be walking through the woods and you see household furniture on the grass. As he gets there, it morphs into his home. There's other surreal goings on like when he makes a large paper aeroplane out of torn journal pages, and uses it to fly.

The actual story can be summed up in a sentence. A boy saves a bird from a badger attack and looks after the bird until it is well enough to fly. I'm sure this story has been done many times before, so I feel it doesn't really offer anything new other than showing it in 16-bit graphics. The actual audio is well done and it does add a lot of emotion. The soundtrack is stored as “.ogg” so you can listen to the soundtrack separately if you wish.

Does Kan Gao feed of the tears of people that play his games? Because thats what it feels like. Even though its not as deep as To the Moon, its still a very beautiful game. It offers visuals and sound similar to those of To the Moon, and the game is great at recreating childhood nostalgia.

Gameplaywise it is very limited, the game very much tells you what to do. Its biggest flaw is that is more predictable, and feels a bit more of the same after playing To The Moon.

A Bird Story is a game that can be beaten in one sitting, but the experience stays with you.