A little girl meets a sad end, only to be reborn as a giant bird bent of bringing calamity to a chaotic town with her feathery blasts in BLACK BIRD.
Your aim is to blast the city to pieces with shots you spit out. This, naturally, doesn’t go over too well with the locals of BLACK BIRD, all of whom have armed themselves in various ways and mean to fight back against your advance. This makes for a screen littered with shots, homing missiles, explosions, and trains wearing makeup (yeah, it’s goofy, but it’s another game from the developers of absurd puzzler Million Onion Hotel).
As you call upon the bird’s super moves and dodge steadily more challenging mobs of cranky locals, you’ll steadily unravel a dark, surreal fairytale story, one which branches into eight different directions depending on how well you’re playing. Perhaps you don’t have to destroy the world after all. Well, if you have a good sense of rhythm and can keep up with how the enemies move to the music, that is.
BLACK BIRD offers some hectic shoot ’em up play with a bleak narrative somehow mingling with some goofy action, all with an ever-growing number of weapons, silly characters, and play modes. There’s a lot going on in what first seems like a simple arcade game, creating an experience that, like Million Onion Hotel, grows more and more rewarding as you get better at it.
BLACK BIRD is available for $19.99 on the Nintendo Switch. A Steam release is also slated for some time in October 2018.
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