The King's Bird

As with N++, Super Meat Boy and other games alike, The King's Bird focuses on control and gameplay over story. Gain "momentum" and use it to glide and rush through the levels it's the key to complete the game and conquer the online rankings. It's a challenging experience, if you're the kind of player that loves speed-running gaming.

The King’s Bird is a tightly designed precision platformer whose gameplay loop consists of retrying the same frustrating areas until reaching the satisfaction of conquering them. Lather, rinse, repeat. The moments of flying through a dreamscape and sticking the landing are a true delight, at least. For fans of hard-mode platformers, this may arrive as a welcome treat and worth sinking a handful of hours into for that sweet payoff, but those with other tastes may want to keep looking elsewhere.

It takes long to master but the rewards will be nothing short of marvelous, as magnificent worlds will open up before the players who invest their time and effort into this piece, if the repetitiveness of some moments does not put them off.

The King’s Bird has the potential to be wonderful—and in its art and music, it is. Based on that alone I would play it all day. But the sense of freedom it is trying so hard to evoke is held back by its finicky controls, and since the game’s very foundation is meant to be freeing, it falls short. Altered controls and a slightly wider margin for error, especially on console, would really let The King’s Bird soar beyond the confines of its cage, and boost its mechanics up to the high tier of its design.

The King's Bird tries to be Gris, but the poetic aspect is ruined by a lack of accuracy in the gameplay, a weird way to unfold the story and huge peaks in difficulty.