The Day I Became A Bird PS5 Review. I can’t help but appreciate when something comes along and reminds me of my inner child. So much of adulthood and the frustrations and fears that come with it make us forget that we are living beings that interact with the world. The Day I Became A Bird reminded me of that, and I very much appreciate this game for it.
The Day I Became A Bird Review (PS5) – Let Out Your Inner Child for A While
Oh, To Be Young Again
During your short stay with The Day I Became A Bird, you play as a boy named Frank in elementary school. Upon arrival at your school, you meet your first love, a girl who absolutely loves birds. She draws them, she plays with them, and she even sounds like one. However, you cannot catch her eye because practically all she sees, hears, and thinks about are birds. So what do you do? You make a bird costume to make sure she sees you.
This is quite a silly premise, but most interactions as children are silly. The story is a fun one, showcasing the folly that comes with changing yourself to appeal to others. It’s not a tear-jerker or overly emotional experience either. It’s just an innocent experience in a child’s life. In general, the game delivers itself much like it were a children’s picture book. I don’t have any kids, but I can imagine how fun it could be for a parent to play with their young children.
Childlike Delivery
The visual style reminds me a lot of that from Charlie Brown but a bit more exaggerated. In a lot of ways, the game comes across like if a child had drawn a story of his or her day and then the story jumped off the page and played out. There is no spoken dialogue, but there’s not much text to begin with. Much like children’s picture books, there’s more to look at than there is to read. To echo a previous point, this would make playing with your young children more interactive, since you would read it all together.
As a game, there isn’t much that the game demands you do. On each day, there are little 10-piece puzzles to put together and then scrolling events where you just move side to side and collect items along the way. Then, you go through a couple of linear areas and then come across a small open area. There, you find items the game asks you to find in order to progress the story. None of this is too demanding, and that seems like an obvious creative choice.
Along the way, you get little interactions where you time your button press for Frank to complete an interaction. If you like, the game also offers an accessibility option where you can just press Cross. That way, you don’t need to worry about timing your button presses. This makes the game that much more casual. The one drawback to simplified controls is when the game asks you to cut paper. Instead of using the Touchpad to direct the scissors, you need to turn the joystick left or right to change direction and then press Cross to make a cut. The simplified controls get clunky very quickly. By the time you’re used to them, you don’t need to use them again.
Pacing Takes A Hit
With that said, the open areas on days two and three almost become tedious. They ask you to collect certain items and then bring them to a central point. However, you can only hold one item at a time. On day two, it’s not so bad, since you only need to collect a couple of things. Day three, however, asks you to find 12 items in a park. This results in a lot of running back and forth.
By no means is this a severe knock on the game. I mention it because I completed the game in 45 minutes without much trouble. I only bring this up because in a game that only runs for 45 minutes, doing one task for 15 minutes of that time slows down the pace a great deal.
On a personal note, the parts of the game that I greatly enjoyed were the little interactions you could have with the world around you. For instance, you can kick a pile of leaves or play a round of Hop Scotch. One of my favorites is when you find a stack of books and try to pull the book out from the middle of the stack without knocking them all over. I remember doing things like that as a kid, seeing life as a challenge worth facing on your own terms.
A Nice Reminder
The Day I Became A Bird is a fun little game that gives you a chance to experience the whimsy of childhood, even for a little while. The game only runs 45 minutes or so, but it still tells a fun little tale. Pacing can be weird at times, particularly in the second half of the game, and the simplified controls make cutting paper in-game much more cumbersome. With that said, nothing gets in the way too much of The Day I Became A Bird putting a little smile on your face.