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free bird.

by Passerine profile

2023

Web Site

(based on 5 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

Written for SeedComp! 2023.

Seeds:
Feathered Fury by Amanda Walker
Room; Closed Door by Charm Cochran

Thumbnail font and ornaments are Treefrog by 3IP Type Foundry.

This story includes mild descriptions of animal neglect and mistreatment, followed by healing and recovery.


Game Details

Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: March 1, 2023
Current Version: Unknown
Development System: Twine
IFID: C67884A0-86B7-4ACE-AD66-F092425EBC4B
TUID: f3ya6tn6u705xpuq

Awards

Entrant - SeedComp! - 2023

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Member Reviews

5 star:
(4)
4 star:
(1)
3 star:
(0)
2 star:
(0)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 2
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A minimalist bird escape adventure, March 14, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This game has you play as a clever bird, a macaw, who is trapped in a cage by a kind of illegal exotic animal dealer and has to escape.

All of this is communicated through minimalistic text that primarily uses adjectives and nouns instead of complete sentences. For instance, examining a bird early on gives the response:

sunken eyes. dry skin. depleted energy.

loose perch.

With the loose perch being a clickable link.

The overall style of gameplay is similar to a single-item-inventory text adventure. You get to pick one thing at a time to hold and can use that item in conjunction with items in the game's world.

This allows for some complex interactions that can be fun to set up.

I encountered a bizarre problem on my end while playing (no other player has found this problem and it wasn't on mobile, so I don't think it's the author's fault) where the game had a missing passage or encountered some other problem where I had to hard restart, about 4 or 5 different times. If anyone else encounters this, switching the platform I was on fixed it immediately (from windows chrome to phone).

Overall, the game is very polished and descriptive. I found the interactivity was interesting, and I could see myself visiting this again.

I didn't feel completely immersed in the game, and found it more of a puzzle box than a bird adventure. But I wonder if I hadn't encountered a bug on my end if I would have been drawn in more. So I'm wavering between a 4 and a 5, but I think I'll go with a 4, because while this game was good, I found the author's other games the Good Ghost and Closure even better, by a significant amount, due to their authentic and engaging dialogue.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Clever bird. Animal praxis., March 2, 2023
by OverThinking
Related reviews: SeedComp, SeedComp 2023

Full disclosure: this game did use my seed “Room; Closed Door,” which challenged authors to create a room escape game using only nouns and adjectives—no verbs. free bird. combines it with another room escape seed: “Feathered Fury” by Amanda Walker, which instructed authors to write a game where you play as a bird of paradise trying to escape from the hideout of a group of poachers. This combo didn’t even enter my mind as I perused the seeds, but this game combines the two with impressive synergy. Each passage is a series of adjective-noun pairs, mostly disconnected from each other to communicate our feathered protagonist’s individual isolated impressions. This immediately puts us in the bird’s headspace both in terms of cognition and confusion, as it’s hard to extrapolate much past the limited information we get.

Still, the protagonist manages to display a good bit of personality. When we look in a mirror early in the game, it describes itself as “handsome macaw.” It has both a good deal of empathy and of pragmatism, able to recognize other animals’ plights and wanting to help even in the narration outside of the player’s choices. It can also pick one thing up at a time in its beak to use as a tool, which makes for some interesting puzzles. I will admit there was one point towards the end where I felt a little stuck, but exploring further revealed sufficient cluing that I’d missed.

The author has described free bird. as “hopepunk,” and I think that’s a perfect descriptor for a story that grows to depict a communal effort to seek freedom, make positive change, and enact radical kindness. I think we could all use a bit of that—even those of us who can’t fly.


If you enjoyed free bird....

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This is version 3 of this page, edited by Passerine on 2 March 2023 at 12:29am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item