The Day I Became A Bird: A Winged Adventure - Review

There are stories that touch the heartstrings and take us back many years, to that first "love," to that intense and sometimes incomprehensible feeling capable of disrupting everyday life. The Day I Became a Bird was not born as a video game but is inspired by Ingrid Chabbert's enchanting children's book, an author who speaks to us in an essential way about the discovery of new feelings.

And she does so with great delicacy, strongly focusing on the boundless creativity of a child who will devise a real stratagem to attract the attention of the girl who stole his heart. A story with nostalgic traits, always current, and one that warms the souls of those (pretty much everyone) who have experienced such sweet moments. 

Before understanding what kind of video game experience we will have in our hands, let us make a small note: The Day I Became A Bird (literally translated in-game as "The day I became a sparrow"), even if it tells an illustrated book of about 40 pages in a more interactive way, fails to delight with a noteworthy gameplay system. It's true, we are talking about a graphic adventure mostly aimed at young players, but we believe that some additional elements would have made this story even more inviting and engaging.

The Day I Became A Bird is an adventure to play with the little ones, even if it will be completed in just under 50 minutes.

Taking Flight with the Power of Love

The first day of school, who among us doesn't remember it? A moment made of anxiety, discovery, and adventure that brings us closer and closer to the "adult world." The protagonist of this story is Frank, a lively and cheerful little boy who falls in love at first sight with Sylvia, a kind girl who loves sparrows above all else: after all, she can't stand to see them live in cages and takes care of them when they are injured.

Frank was probably struck by Sylvia's good soul and will devise quite a clever stratagem to attract her attention: he will transform himself into nothing less than a bird. To do this, he will have to collect boxes, leaves, and draw every anatomical part to transform his body into that of a sparrow, wobbling back and forth through the school and even sparking the hilarity of the other children. But who cares, after all: Frank is determined and has even abandoned his passions to make Sylvia happy, a true muse in that journey filled with butterflies in his stomach.

Many of us will have found ourselves living a similar experience, and The Day I Became A Bird, just like in the book, faithfully reproduces this feeling and animates those illustrated pages with absolute delicacy. The game is divided into four days, characterized by mini-chapters in Frank's shoes where he will live his life with absolute lightness (how beautiful childhood is!). Feeding the dog, dribbling like football prodigies, dancing to the rhythm, and playing hopscotch will be just some of the activities available to us. In each chapter, in addition to performing specific tasks including preparing for school or collecting some raw materials, we can also collect feathers to complete the chapter 100%. 

And here arise our first perplexities: why include collectible objects if they don't reward us with noteworthy extras? It almost seems like an activity for its own sake, a pretext to wander through small scenarios without a specific purpose. We believe that every playful component should always be harmonious within a production, otherwise, it could be omitted without problems. 

In the four days that will accompany the events, one can interact with the game world but always in a rather basic way: at school or in the park, in addition to collecting the objects that we will then need to build our "feathered costume," we will listen to some dialogues that highlight the most common problems for children aged 6/7. And it's not pleasant, for example, for a thirty-year-old to be called old… but then again, that's life. At the end of almost every sequence, we will have to build a puzzle, rearrange those pieces that will then give us an artwork that will be narrated like a real illustrated book. 

An Experience That Is Far Too Contained

The story, although interesting and touching, we found to be rushed and probably even more immediate than a children's book. And we all agree that extending the story would have distorted Ingrid Chabbert's book, but adding more background elements, more dialogues, and moments to experience Frank's life would certainly have benefited the video game. Instead, The Day I Became A Bird ends quickly, and as soon as you manage to empathize with the protagonist, the story reaches the credits. Let's face it, we enormously love stories, and that of The Day I Became A Bird was like a journey back to childhood moments. Likewise, this production does not have a fair quality-price ratio, and the artistic quality, despite everything, does not fully justify it. 

If from a purely gameplay perspective we were not fully satisfied with this indie adventure, we remain pleasantly surprised by its visual nature. In fact, the creative team managed to beautifully animate Raúl Nieto Guridi's monochromatic illustrations, making them so vivid and full of color to the player's eyes. And besides this, we appreciated the implementation of fonts that allow people with dyslexia to read the various texts more easily.

The Day I Became A Bird is a story of delicate beauty that lays bare emotions, the most sincere ones, experienced through the eyes of a child who wants to give his heart to the person he loves. However, for a video game, we would have expected a little more.