Welcome to our review of Black Bird, an ominous game about a young girl that died and reincarnated as the demonic Black Bird.
A bird of happiness, or fowl fortune? Feathers black, all lives consumed!
This is the tale of a young girl who dies one day on a street corner and is reborn as the ominous Black Bird. The bird is one of the great calamities, spoken of in the kingdom since ancient times.
Become the calamity, ‘Black Bird’, and destroy the kingdom… What fate awaits this girl-turned bird? Will you, the Black Bird, destroy the world?
Black Bird received 2 awards at BitSummit Vol.6, a Japanese indie game festival held in 2018. The first is the “Vermilion Gate Award” which is the grand Prix prize, and the second one is a music award: the “Excellence in Audio Award”!
This is the best indie game from Japan in 2018!
Black Bird is a continuous scrolling shooter, with you as the Black Bird. It gets hectic really fast and this entire game is the figurative uphill battle. It is incredibly challenging and that is where the fun lies in games like these. Just so many things are hidden in this game, new upgrades, new characters, bombs, …
It is now up to you to find your best way to attack the stages and get that high score. Black Bird has a great international leaderboard and it is impressive to see so many players already present in that leaderboard. I was very impressed with the top 10 scores, they were out of my league (for now).
As this game resembles Graceful Explosion Machine in its gameplay and ideas, it is clear to say that I enjoy gameplay like this, but there are some differences. Black Bird forces you to restart from level 1 on your demise while GEM did have the level list for you to pick from. GEM is futuristic and Black Bird is very ominous in design.
It looks like they spent ages handcrafting these levels, they look gorgeous and I adore this pixellated style. Would it be better if the levels were fully colored? I honestly would not know. I love the color scheme as it is. The game is just perfect the way it looks, at least in my humble opinion.
So what is wrong with the game?
If anything, the lack of a continue feature maybe? I would like to keep playing without having to worry about the permadeath? I guess that would be the one. Most of the boss battles do take a while to beat and you do not just restart a 20-minute session just because you were 1 life bar short of victory. On the other hand, it does force you to play the best you can and employ a perfect strategy in order to keep advancing.
In conclusion, I can see why this game is the indie of the year in Japan, this game is such a handful, both hard and fun at the same time, I can only recommend it!
