Free Bird

Free Bird’s blurb conveys at best a profound ambivalence about its value: of this short game functioning as a proof-of-concept for a Python IF system, the author says “I never liked it very much,” admits that “the program is inferior to Inform and other parser game creation tools in almost every way”, and closes by saying “I wouldn’t recommend this game or my attempt at a Python interactive fiction ‘library’ to anyone.” Oh, and unlike any of the myriad Python-based IF games I’ve wrestled with, the installation instructions flat-out tell you “it’s not user-friendly.”

Well, that last part is indubitably right – despite my aforementioned track record of snake wrangling, it still took me a solid fifteen minutes to figure out how to get it running (protip: you don’t need to download anything manually to install the required PyGame library, just type in the command prominently featured on the website and Python will take care of the rest). And it’s not surprising to me that one person dabbling at a project can’t rival the multiple decades of effort that have given rise to the Inform ecosystem – I’m not at all qualified to assess how well it works as an authoring environment, but while the system here boasts a reasonably solid parser it also has some foibles even once it’s up and running. The text was blurry on my machine with no obvious way to sharpen it, the scroll function didn’t work for me on either keyboard or trackpad, and the innocuous command SING TO KEY seemed to crash the game, for example. It’s better than many custom systems I’ve played, but there was never a moment where I wasn’t thinking “I wish I were playing this in Inform or TADS.”

On the flip side, though, I wasn’t thinking that just because those languages are more robust, but because I was having a good time with Free Bird and would have preferred it if the author had had more time to flesh out the content rather than work on building a new platform. Often in this kind of situation the demo game is an afterthought, a bland bit of dungeoneering crafted as a showcase for the world’s blandest medium-dry-goods puzzles. Not so with Free Bird, which starts as its protagonist – an immortal avian spirit – is freed from a millennium-long imprisonment by the slow passage of time finally eroding away the runes by which it was bound by a long-dead sorcerer. It’s an evocative setup, rendered in evocative language – I couldn’t copy and paste the text so you’ll largely have to take my word that the prose is really good, but I did jot down the phrase “they chained you in a miserable cell of bitter iron” as a representative example.

Beyond the setup, the puzzle-solving also has a distinctive flair: as implied in my crash-bug report above, since you’re a bird-god, your primary way of interacting with the world is through your songs. Weak as you are, SINGing at a particular object might only give it the weakest of shakes, but these small tweaks and nudges, properly deployed, allow you to navigate a compellingly realized set of ruins. The puzzles here are all ones a seasoned adventurer will have seen before, and the general environment is of course likewise familiar, but there are lovely details that put an endearingly novel spin on even so hoary a chestnut as obtaining a light source. While the game does lose some steam at the very end – after a paid of well-done puzzles where you learn some backstory about your captor and reclaim a greater measure of your magical power, the final sequence just sees you unlock a door with a key to reach an abrupt victory screen – it definitely still left me wanting more. As a proof of concept for Python as a major-league IF platform, Free Bird is, as advertised, a failure, but as an indicator of its author’s skill at making games, it’s a secret success.