Freebird Games - 2014 - PC
Earlier this year, Freebird Games and head developer Kan Gao released a free mini-DLC epilogue for their excellent 2011 game To The Moon. This DLC served as a sort of epilogue for To The Moon that wrapped up the story and tied into the next entry in the series. A Bird Story, which came out earlier this week, was teased as being the game in the To The Moon series and that's both true and misleading at the same time. I found A Bird Story to be actually more like the DLC that was released earlier this year - it's a short mini-episode that's meant to bridge To The Moon and its eventual full-length sequel together and introduce the sequel's new main character. While A Bird Story is a full, albeit very short, standalone game in the To The Moon universe, it also has some notable differences from its predecessor. Firstly, there is absolutely no dialogue in A Bird Story. Secondly, because A Bird Story takes place long before the events of To The Moon (and presumably long before Watts or Rosalene were even born), you play not as Dr. Watts or Dr. Rosalene, but as a young boy who will eventually become their patient in the next game.
The most defining characteristic of A Bird Story is its heavy focus on narrative, but complete lack of dialogue of any kind. This is in stark contrast to To The Moon which was a game made up almost entirely of reading text boxes. I found this to be the most interesting "mechanic" in A Bird Story. This places a greater importance on music to set the mood and the animation to convey the action in the game, which is pretty ambitious for a 2D sprite based game. After finding a few of the opening scenes to be ambiguous and difficult to interpret, I was initially not too fond of this style of storytelling. I was getting annoyed that I couldn't tell what the game was trying to convey to me, so I instead chose to focus on what *my* interpretations of the scenes were. I found this approach to the game made it much more enjoyable and I'll go as far as to say that I think the game was actually intended to be played this way. By the nature of removing all dialogue, A Bird Story sets itself up to be much more open to interpretation than literal like its predecessor. Plus A Bird Story has a very metaphorical and almost dreamlike quality to it which meshes well with its dialogue-less-ness.
While To The Moon had qualities of science fiction, these sci-fi laws were explained and defined and for the most part, the game played by its own rules throughout its story. A Bird Story is much less concerned with what rules govern its in game reality, and instead goes for a very dreamlike aesthetic. It's often hard to tell if what you're witnessing is "actually happening" or if its part of the main character's fantasy or daydream. This is exemplified not only in the events of the story, but in the game's level design too. In the first scenes of the game, the main character walks from his school to his apartment, establishing their physical locations in the game world. But then in a subsequent scene, the character walks back to his school from the apartment via a different path which goes in a totally contradictory direction than the one taken in the previous scene. You still know where you are, but the game invalidates its own rules for how its game world is laid out structurally. It reminded me of how sometimes the architecture of dreams isn't quite exactly correct. You still know where you are, but there are sometimes little shortcuts and inconsistencies with reality.
Kan Gao's excellent musical composition skills are on display again in A Bird Story. I did catch at least one recycled track from To The Moon, but I'm pretty sure all of the rest of the music in the game was original. I'm also a fan of the old school 2D sprite aesthetic and some of the backgrounds in the game are very well drawn. Without any dialogue, the music and artwork get an increased emphasis, and they do a good job of creating mood and atmosphere.
Summary:
A Bird Story does stand on its own, but I'm not sure I'd recommend this to people who haven't already played To The Moon and enjoyed it. It feels more like a shorter and more compressed version of everything that was great about To The Moon. Clocking in at just over an hour, it's a very short experience, but is probably priced appropriately at $5. The storytelling without dialogue works, but it just didn't quite have the same impact on me as To The Moon. I'm now looking forward to Finding Paradise which I guess will be the next "proper" game in the To The Moon series
The most defining characteristic of A Bird Story is its heavy focus on narrative, but complete lack of dialogue of any kind. This is in stark contrast to To The Moon which was a game made up almost entirely of reading text boxes. I found this to be the most interesting "mechanic" in A Bird Story. This places a greater importance on music to set the mood and the animation to convey the action in the game, which is pretty ambitious for a 2D sprite based game. After finding a few of the opening scenes to be ambiguous and difficult to interpret, I was initially not too fond of this style of storytelling. I was getting annoyed that I couldn't tell what the game was trying to convey to me, so I instead chose to focus on what *my* interpretations of the scenes were. I found this approach to the game made it much more enjoyable and I'll go as far as to say that I think the game was actually intended to be played this way. By the nature of removing all dialogue, A Bird Story sets itself up to be much more open to interpretation than literal like its predecessor. Plus A Bird Story has a very metaphorical and almost dreamlike quality to it which meshes well with its dialogue-less-ness.
While To The Moon had qualities of science fiction, these sci-fi laws were explained and defined and for the most part, the game played by its own rules throughout its story. A Bird Story is much less concerned with what rules govern its in game reality, and instead goes for a very dreamlike aesthetic. It's often hard to tell if what you're witnessing is "actually happening" or if its part of the main character's fantasy or daydream. This is exemplified not only in the events of the story, but in the game's level design too. In the first scenes of the game, the main character walks from his school to his apartment, establishing their physical locations in the game world. But then in a subsequent scene, the character walks back to his school from the apartment via a different path which goes in a totally contradictory direction than the one taken in the previous scene. You still know where you are, but the game invalidates its own rules for how its game world is laid out structurally. It reminded me of how sometimes the architecture of dreams isn't quite exactly correct. You still know where you are, but there are sometimes little shortcuts and inconsistencies with reality.
Kan Gao's excellent musical composition skills are on display again in A Bird Story. I did catch at least one recycled track from To The Moon, but I'm pretty sure all of the rest of the music in the game was original. I'm also a fan of the old school 2D sprite aesthetic and some of the backgrounds in the game are very well drawn. Without any dialogue, the music and artwork get an increased emphasis, and they do a good job of creating mood and atmosphere.
Summary:
A Bird Story does stand on its own, but I'm not sure I'd recommend this to people who haven't already played To The Moon and enjoyed it. It feels more like a shorter and more compressed version of everything that was great about To The Moon. Clocking in at just over an hour, it's a very short experience, but is probably priced appropriately at $5. The storytelling without dialogue works, but it just didn't quite have the same impact on me as To The Moon. I'm now looking forward to Finding Paradise which I guess will be the next "proper" game in the To The Moon series
No comments:
Post a Comment