Have you ever wanted to fly? Enter the whimsical world of this 2D platformer and kickstart the journey of a young unlikely hero, as you take flight across four worlds all distinguished with their own theme. With a fitting name, The King’s Bird by Serenity Forge offers a beautiful landscape to gain momentum and glide with its simplistic style and fluid animations. This game is a joyful testament that it’s not about the destination, but rather the journey.
Gameplay of The King’s Bird
A young silhouetted girl with a desire to travel outside of her magically protected hometown goes against her King’s order and lands herself outside in an undiscovered world, along with a strange new ability for flight. With this newfound power, you guide her across vast zones and tight corners where hints of ancient civilizations are scattered in the form of traps or acrobatic puzzles.
Though at first, these controls can be hard to tame, once you leave the hub world and start sliding down slopes only to swiftly rise up airborne, dashing through pillars and vivid colours without a worry, the controls quickly become organic and easy to navigate. As the weight of this story solely relies on fluid and flexible navigation, the whole game becomes a relaxing experience to breeze through. For about 8 to 10 hours, that is.
Overall Design
The levels of The King’s Bird depict gorgeous, intricate backdrops of varying themes: Forest, Lake, Sky, and Fallen. The art found within the levels reveals a faint hint of an ancient past, either on how the current world came to be or how the previous one disappeared. The cast of characters themselves has been granted with personalized colours, and even sounds. It adds much-appreciated charm to the game, as all of them appear as black silhouettes.
Though it doesn’t offer a more chunky story, these design choices help soothe the player into a calm and zen mood. Something that does not help with this though, is the platform design. Up until the second world, the levels displayed are wide and give a lot of space to freestyle and express your inner bird. But entering the third world the levels become tighter, the corridors more dangerous to pass through. And although that is no problem for gaining momentum, the aspect of ‘fly however you want’ turns into ‘be precise and survive’. For the purposes of keeping the game fun and easier to play, the game designers thankfully put an assist mode.
Where can I get it?
Currently The King’s Bird is available via Steam and only for PC, though according to devs they are intending on doing a console release soon. Personally, a pretty and unique aesthetic paired with interactive sound design should be right on par with most console games. So players, keep watch on this “pearl” of a game!
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