A Bird Story follows the story of a boy who helps a wild bird. Their time together becomes magical in more ways than one.
After playing To The Moon I was left with a lot of emotions. And then I found out they were making a Bird Story. Fast-forward to November, 2014 and it was finally released, although I was unable to actually play it until just recently. I jumped in as soon as I could and prepared myself for an experience. And boy did I get an experience.
A Bird Story is short – it clocks in at just around an hour. They even say this to you up front. But that’s fine – in that hour you will be taken on a journey through a wide variety of emotions. You’ll go from fear to laughter to tears all throughout that one hour.
There is no direct dialogue in A Bird Story. Any “dialogue” is shown through character motions or speech bubbles with images in them. This works to the games advantage, as I feel any actual dialogue would have hurt some of the experience.
The boy you play as seems to always be left home alone. When he finds a hurt bird (after scaring off the evil badger), he wants to take it to the vet but the bird is too shy. What follows after is a story of helping the bird to heal, magical paper from a book, paper airplanes, and a little bit of love.
Sure, some bits of the story will make you think “that’s not how it works!” That’s what makes it more magical however – it doesn’t need to be realistic. Who wouldn’t like to soar through the sky on a giant paper airplane, bringing food (or something, never figured it out) to birds on small floating islands. Who wouldn’t like to try and escape the evil security guy on the same plane, only to lose everything you’ve built up.
A Bird Story controls much like To The Moon did. You can move with the arrow keys, interact with enter. You can also jump (sometimes, like when it’s raining). The jumping will even play a part in the story at one point! Yeah, I enjoyed the jumping part… especially splashing in the puddles!
A Bird Story is a magical journey that will pull at your heart strings, much like To The Moon did. So while it is only an hour or so long, it is a fantastic hour and is very much a game worth checking out. The game was very much worth the wait since I had played To The Moon, though it does appear I will not be waiting for yet another game to come out… Let the wait begin.
A Bird Story Review Score
4.5/5
A Bird Story is now available on Steam.
