Bird Alone
iOS
Stressed? Join the club. The human response to stress has always been at the heart of game design: for many years, interactive entertainment has worked on the assumption that we all react to adversity with either aggression or fear. Bird Alone is the latest game to foreground not our fight-or-flight instincts, but the inclination to ‘tend and befriend’ our way out of hardship.
Okay, there is some flight. This is, essentially, a philosophical Tamagotchi on your phone – but instead of an egg, you’re looking after a desperately lonely parrot. Unlike a Tamagotchi, you won’t have to regularly feed it or clean up its effluent (that’d be too much of a busman’s holiday for many, we imagine). But it’s a needy thing nonetheless: your new friend will nudge you a couple of times a day via notifications whenever it fancies a chat.
You’ll usually begin by responding to everyday, even juvenile, questions: what your favourite colour is, for example. But conversations can take thought-provoking turns. When our preference matches that of the parrot’s, it wonders aloud whether that makes us feel more or less special. The writing (courtesy of George Batchelor, the creator behind reflective narrative vignette Far From Noise) is sharp and soft by turns, top-class comedic timing helped along by the audiovisual presentation of certain phrases often tempered in the very next instance by unaffected sincerity. It allows Batchelor and friends’ parrot to tackle big topics – the authentic versus the inauthentic self, creative burnout and the nature of perfectionism, the inherent ridiculousness of life – without mawkishness. This tender-hearted indie game’s self-awareness prompts chuckles: as you pick out a plot in your garden for a new shrub, our friend deadpans: “This plant is going through a divorce. Plant it carefully.”
The new seed has sprung from our daily dabblings in a musical waterfall, the parrot warbling along in harmony; the plants grown can be played like instruments. On another screen, we fill in the blanks of poems, and scribble pictures based on prompts. The latter two exercises are more consistently stimulating, even if we curse the lack of an eraser tool. The gardening wears thin quickly, as the plants don’t feel connected to anything of import: we find ourselves wishing they were more concretely associated with certain memories or milestones with our parrot friend, or indeed within our personal life.
Still, as we check in once or twice a day, watching the seasons change, discussing everything from the weather to our innermost insecurities, it becomes clear who Bird Alone is actually encouraging us to look after. At a time when, more than ever, connecting with others starts by working on ourselves, this endearing twist on the tend-and-befriend genre is a friend indeed.