Well, its noon and I've been up since seven last night and I decided to write this review to get it out of the way. I'm wondering how many mistakes I'm going to make in the review (I've come back and edited it since I wrote, there was a pretty massive amount of typos). The fact I decided to write about the review in this state of utter exhaustion should give you a pretty clear indication about how I feel about the game though.
'A Bird Story' is an interactive movie (as opposed to being a videogame) developed and published by Freebird Games and is only available on the PC to play. Its the second game I've played from this developer and what I thought was an interest in a new genre turned out to simply be me ascribing my love of the narrative of 'To The Moon' on to everything else. I'm going to be comparing the two in this review since they are essentially identical games in everything except the narrative.
The art style and music choices in 'A Bird Story' like every other games developed by Freebird are very minimalist 16-bit looking graphics and music. This obviously makes it easier for them to develop and it can still convey enough of their characters to try and get your emotions going working together with the game play and the narrative. The issue here though is that since this game lacks game play its the narrative that is left to carry the entire experience.
This is where the game just fell apart for me, the narrative simply wasn't strong enough to carry the game. I think the lack of dialogue mostly hurt the game more than it helped it as the lack of graphic details means you can't tell the emotional state of the characters. I understand that this also means that you can project your own feeling on to them, the problem here is that the character is not universally relatable. The simplicity of the plot also makes it very shallow, there isn't much to think about or reflect on. To compare 'To The Moon' had an incredibly deep plot that discussed a number of issues of the human condition aside from just having interesting characters, settings and twists.
To put it simply, I didn't like 'A Bird Story', I bought the game on good faith given that I loved 'To The Moon' but the gap in quality between the two of them is fairly massive. The plot here can't even compare to the far more enjoyable one in 'To The Moon'. This game essentially proved to me that being an interactive movie wasn't the reason I liked 'To The Moon' having a good narrative was the reason I did. If you haven't gotten the hint yet, I recommend that you don't buy this game, get 'To The Moon' its a far more compelling experience.
This is where the game just fell apart for me, the narrative simply wasn't strong enough to carry the game. I think the lack of dialogue mostly hurt the game more than it helped it as the lack of graphic details means you can't tell the emotional state of the characters. I understand that this also means that you can project your own feeling on to them, the problem here is that the character is not universally relatable. The simplicity of the plot also makes it very shallow, there isn't much to think about or reflect on. To compare 'To The Moon' had an incredibly deep plot that discussed a number of issues of the human condition aside from just having interesting characters, settings and twists.
To put it simply, I didn't like 'A Bird Story', I bought the game on good faith given that I loved 'To The Moon' but the gap in quality between the two of them is fairly massive. The plot here can't even compare to the far more enjoyable one in 'To The Moon'. This game essentially proved to me that being an interactive movie wasn't the reason I liked 'To The Moon' having a good narrative was the reason I did. If you haven't gotten the hint yet, I recommend that you don't buy this game, get 'To The Moon' its a far more compelling experience.
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