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.