However, there was something in the first commercial title of Freebird Games that managed to excel with respect to projects born of the same engine, and it was an extraordinary sensibility and an amazing ability to tell a story with adjusted means, but well taken advantage of. That game was called To the Moon and is, even today, one of the most beautiful narrative experiences that can be found in the market, without the need to have a dazzling graphic section or a technologytoecap.
Fiddling with sprites in a two-dimensional world, that small miracle convinced those who could prove it and is, at least for the editor of this analysis, among the best independent games of recent years, on that same shelf where he would place Braid or Limbo ,
to quote just one pair. Therefore, that its main designer has a new game is nothing but a reason for joy, even though – as is the case – the results are not at all as fascinating as in the previous attempt. A Bird Story is the new watermark of Kan “Reives” Gao
, designer of To the Moon, a small game with an adjusted cost (€ 5) that is sold from its own product card for what it really is: a narrative game closer to an interactive movie than a videogame . With just over an hour (65 minutes marks us on Steam, having completed it in one sitting),
what we find in this new project is something that we can not value to use, as we would in any other analysis, and that is that even compared to its predecessor
here is such debugging at the level of mechanics (and we pluralize with doubts) that we could not even talk about it as a videogame. In other words, everything that relates to the user’s interaction with what happens on the screen is limited, say an approximate percentage ,
to 5% of the total duration of the title. In these moments, what we do is move our protagonist with the arrows of the keyboard in the directions indicated, or use the space to launch a paper airplane with impulse or take a small jump over a puddle. The most interactive thing
we find, in fact, is to fly over a giant paper plane looking for five bird nests in an open sky. Those of you who played To the Moon will remember that this was not a very focused game towards exploration or mechanics per se, focusing especially on its facet
narrative . Well, by comparison, that was the most complex game ever designed. Judging then A Bird Story with the same criteria is absurd, impossible, because to give a value to its ‘
playability ‘ in a global context such as the total annual releases, would not deserve more than one out of ten. This does not mean that the little that the game does is bad; simply, it is that what is limited to doing can not be assessed, because there is nothing beyond moving the character through the screen at specific moments, or picking up objectsvisibly located on
the screen (only on a couple of occasions, highlighted so that we see them with an intermittent brightness). How can one defend, then, A Bird Story? Only,from the guts . That is to say, as a purely narrative experience , and that is something that falls squarely in the field of the subjective, so that to make an analysis to the use lacks a real sense. We can speak, yes, of history .
How it starts with a child throwing an airplane from his terrace, in the middle of the night. From his arrival at school and how later, on his way home,
he finds a bird being chased by a badger and how he decides to take it home to cure his wing, because it is broken and can not fly. What happens a posteriori is the core of the game, a story of friendship and discovery that can not be detailed to avoid incurring spoilers or destripes
