The King's Bird (2018)

So The King's Bird started off incredibly strong. Fantastic soundtrack, great atmosphere, super fun controls. You play as a girl who faces a tyrant to be free. I think. The story isn't much. You just kind of do levels until you fight the King and it ends.

That's besides the point. The main focus of this game is obviously gameplay and style. The former, starts off very well but begins the lose it's lustre by the end. The latter it nails consistently. The game is a precision platformer, like Super Meat Boy and Celeste and it shares the penchant for difficulty. It does not, however, share the same variety as either of those. In 30 seconds of trailer for Celeste, I saw probably ten times more mechanics and THINGS than The King's Bird. Literally the only hazard in this game are spikes. It gets old after a while doing nothing but dodging spikes.

What The King's Bird excels at is momentum based platforming. You can boost and you can glide. And using those abilities you can go really really fast. And when it hits, in the first two worlds, Forest Kingdom and the River Kingdom, it is a better Sonic than anything released since the 90s lol (Sonic Mania excluded). Seriously though, the first two worlds were awesome and probably would have kept this at a 4 star rating. But when you get to the Sky Kingdom something happens. It gets hard. Like really really hard. And most of the levels, it's fine. It's just hard, no big deal. But some of the levels, I genuinely could not figure out what to do, even watching other people's completed runs (A great feature btw). The controls, fine before in the previous two world, tend to fall apart in the last bits. When a margin of error was allowed, I could flow from point to point, like a beautiful bird in the sky (see what i did?). When the entire level is spikes, I found that the turning radius when flying was incredibly wide and it made it difficult to control.

Fortunately you don't need to actually beat every single level in the game. You play in a hub world and select your missions that way, and once you finish X amount of missions, you can move on. The hub world aspect is an absolute disaster. If you're going to have a level based game like this, it should be in a menu or linearly placed. You can DIE on the hub world. Fortunately the hub worlds make frequent use of checkpoints, which the main game also does, a point in its favor.

The final level is 90+% spikes. It's genuinely not fun, and requires the precision and patience of a god. It also introduces a new "mechanic" in how you use your two abilities. In the last level. It's just not a great look to introduce a new way to play that late in the game imo. Especially when the level was already punishingly hard. The final (and only) boss is interesting but presents the only major failing in the game's art design. Several of his attacks look almost exactly like you (black and white design with a white tail of light streaming out) and one of his attacks pushes you off the screen so fast you can't see your character and will probably nose dive and die.

Once you beat the game, and I'm not sure if it was just a bug on my end, but you make a choice. It isn't particularly clear what the choice is or what it even means, but there was no sound whatsoever, and a title card just popped up and no credits played, which I assume was supposed to happen.

Overall it's a fun little indie game I got with Humble, but it's marred by a huge difficulty spike (lots of spikes) that you aren't eased into and a lack of variety. Even the gorgeous art and beautiful music get old when the best you get is a palette change.

From the minute I even got a glance at the trailer, I knew this game was going to be good. Soon enough I found out I was not wrong and wasn't even surprised.

It took me a while to grasp my hand on the controls in order to play it fluidly, how it's supposed to be played, I admit it, and at first it seemed way too difficult but after like an hour I was having the time of my life. I think the best part of my experience was how I could feel myself betting better and better at it every passing level, how my hands started mindlessly flying over the keyboard, like I've been playing platformer games like such for a lot longer than it's actually been. Reminds me of how much I love this genre.

The thing I enjoy the most about this game is that it's not made for everyone, but it could be, if you make it that way. I found my competitive spirit fired up by the challenging design of the majority of the levels. They're not laid in front of you in a very specific order, so you can lose your mind every time you find yourself stuck on a particularly "impossible" looking one. It gives you a choice, a choice of how you want to play and if you want to play, and I think this is what most games should strive for. There is an "Assist mode" in the menu which gives you the power of tweaking the game a lot, making it easier, or in my opinion - sometimes even more enjoyable.

I'm having fun playing this game. I'm having fun playing the most challenging levels and raging for 70 minutes straight on a stage which is supposed to be beat in a minute, but I'm still not rage quitting (my fingers hurt). I'm having fun coming back to my favourite levels, striking for the shortest time possible to beat the best of speedrunners, or mindlessly flowing around, listening to the beautiful soundtrack, staring at the gorgeous environment and the lovely colours its painted with. Sometimes switching on Assist mode to turn off some of the limits of the physics just to carelessly glide across the screen, doing some crazy looking cascades. It looks good and it feels good and it's fun.

There's a little bit of everything for everyone. The music, the art, the crazy game mechanics, the story, told purely by visuals and sound. There are some cool details, like how the voices of the characters are different musical instruments (like in Don't Starve, if you've seen it, I think it's very fitting) or how the most hardcore levels are those most difficult to reach in the first place, let alone play. But that's the thing, you aren't obligated to get through absolutely everything this game has to offer and that I think, is most important. Yes the game definitely can and will kick you ass, but only if you allow it to. Honestly, I'm having fun nonetheless and that's what matters the most to me.

That's just my point of view according to my experience. I personally see no reason why I could give it any less that 5 stars. It's good, it's pretty and delightful to play, I love it.