The Bird of Light is a game about various farm animals talking among each other as a human girl with red hair appears at the farm. These highly stylized and talkative animals are a cheery bunch that likes to stand in the way a lot. Much like Aesop’s fables the story is a metaphor, told through the animals that slowly disappear, one by one. This would be a good thing if it meant less of the damnable herd would stop blocking my path, so get used to seeing the restart screen a lot. I will not spoil the story at this point in time or talk about my thoughts on the theme. Bird of light is about ever-running ginger that can turn on intersections, jump over obstacles and reverse direction. Sound easy right? Think again, this is a quite tricky and slightly addictive platform game indeed.
Most of the map is made up of squares with intersecting paths, seeded with things to bypass, floating blue eggs, some powerups, tokens, and a key to the castle.
Not only that some of the paths I had to place some manually in order to optimize the route, since at least one of these goals has to be completed in order to progress the story. Eventually, the levels become more and more complicated with a metric ton of cows, sheep, and pigs to dodge.
Tokens are used to show where pickups are hidden on the map. Unless the goal is to speed run the map I usually just go for the eggs as they will progress the story. As seen in the screenshots the graphic is both polished and stylized, which is quite pleasant to look at make Bird of Light stand out. It is a bold move to go with such a colorful art direction. I certainly love the ever-so-satisfying Matrix-style long jump, which works surprisingly well.
While the graphic is nice and all, there is a distinct lack of settings. For some reason, I got thrown straight into a tutorial with the music blaring. This brings me to the next point and problem, while the music is nice and decent, it does get quite repetitive and imposing after a while. Luckily it can be muted, it’s just a bit annoying that I have to use the audio mixer in Windows to lower the volume.
Challenges and re-playability come from the various badges as seen here, they mostly explain themselves. There are Steam achievements as well. For people who enjoy a good and topical story with a twist. A truckload of nail-bitingly challenging levels, with some fun and well-implanted mechanics, look no further. though I was more interested in getting through the story.
-Njål Sand
Njål Sand is a Norwegian Cosplayer with opinions on video games, and a passionate for creating content on YouTube about living in Norway, and gaming!