LogFAQs > #965731563

The King's Bird (PC)

Really, really cool momentum-based precision platformer. As someone who often doesn't seem to understand physics and who is only sometimes good at precision platformers, that could've been a real recipe for disaster, and the movement mechanics definitely took a while to get used to, but man is it satisfying when things come together.

There's no enemies; just you versus a world of shortish but tightly designed levels, with a lot of options to tweak the difficulty for folks having trouble - Assist Mode lets you increase your gliding stamina or give yourself immunity to the brambles that otherwise kill you or even just skip to the next checkpoint if you like, and you don't have to finish every level to beat the game, far from it actually. I, of course, opted for an all-levels playthrough without any of those tweaks and therefore bashed my head against the wall of some of the tougher stages, but there were fairly few instances where I was frustrated by something that felt overly challenging. Most people seem to contend that the game has a huge difficulty curve, but I never really had that impression. Everything seemed to progress at a pretty natural rate all the way to the final level, which seems to do a great job of testing you on everything you've learned up to that point.

Also, King's Bird is gorgeous. Its art style is just pure indie-style goodness and it's got a lovely ethereal soundtrack to match. Anytime I needed to give my fingers a rest, I was happy to just hang out for a while and look at the level backgrounds. There's not much of a narrative to speak of - there are maybe half a dozen lines of text in the entire game with everything else being communicated through gestures and bits of speech expressed only through musical notes, plus some murals and dream-sequence-esque moments that illustrate the history of the world, so most everything is left to the player's interpretations. I'm not smart enough to figure any of it out, honestly, except that there's definitely a heavy theme of the desire for freedom and its consequential cost, but it still left an impression.

This is one of those games that clearly had a ton of care and love put into it, and yet another precision platformer that's 1000x better than Super Meat Boy. Definitely recommended for fans of that niche.