With thanks in advance to the wonderful Christian Donlan who put me onto 30 Birds in the first place, please allow me to emphatically repeat the headline of this piece one more time before we begin in earnest: please, you need to play 30 Birds immediately, and I implore you to find the half an hour it will take you to finish its Steam Next Fest demo as soon as you’re physically able.
Phew. Right. Well, if your eyeballs haven’t been drawn to its sumptuous artwork already, 30 Birds is an absolutely gorgeous game set in a world made up entirely of dreamy paper lanterns, blending characterful 2D artwork with mesmerising 3D play spaces that rotate and bend like pop-up paper dioramas. Screenshots don’t really do it justice, but if you have a peak at the trailer below, you’ll see exactly what I mean. It’s just can’t get enough of it, and I am utterly in love with everything about it.
You play as Zig, a young detective who’s on her way to Lantern City to witness the awakening of the bird goddess Simurgh. Simurgh is the one responsible for creating this bustling dreamscape, conjuring up the town squares, shops and bathhouses and weaving them right into the fabric of the night sky, we’re told. She’s also been asleep these past 50 years, but now it’s time for her to return and bless the world with the visions she’s been building while getting a bit of shut eye. Of course, things don’t go quite according to plan, for as soon as Simurgh cracks her beady eye open, she’s sucked into a portal and disappears, with nothing but the mark of the mysterious ‘Scientist’ left behind.
Lucky for Lantern City, Zig’s on the case, and she immediately sets about trying to find out who took Simurgh and how this so-called ‘Scientist’ managed to capture a goddess, following a trial of clues and tips from her informant buddy to begin her investigation. With all your tasks, quests and inventory items logged in your handy phone, the demo for 30 Birds has you exploring all the different sides of Lantern City and chatting with its fantastical cast of creatures and ne’er-do-wells to find out what happened.
Along the way, you’ll also engage in some light musical tomfoolery, twisting knobs and wiggling your mouse to create weird and whimsical tunes on animal-themed synthesisers that wouldn’t look totally out of place in the rhythm toybox puzzler Knob. The first time you’re handed one of these wonderful little music boxes, it’s just for fun, but the second encounter you have in the demo gives you the opportunity to lure a suspicious shopkeeper away from their stall so you can raid his back room where a fellow bird has been imprisoned. Music is everywhere in 30 Birds, and these percussive and tactile interludes perfectly complement its ska, dub and reggae-infused soundtrack.
As you might have guessed from the title, finding and befriending all 30 of Lantern City’s feathered inhabitants will form a key part of 30 Birds’ overarching story, but I had just as much fun chin-wagging with the rest of its locals, too. Its taut and witty script suggests that there will be plenty of larger-than-life characters to meet along your journey – like the three-eyed djinn Sudsby, who’s very perturbed that you interrupted his bathtime, and the cloaked jackal Rudy, who just wants to make sweet beats with his frog synth machine. Every reaction, glance and expression are so vividly animated, too, even though the game’s visual style has more in common with stop-motion than the free-flowing frames we’re used to elsewhere. All in all, it’s a real feast for the senses, drawing the eye as much as your ears and fingers to poke and prod this Persian-inspired world to see what lies beneath it.
And fortunately, we hopefully won’t have to wait too much longer before we can unravel this mystery in full, as the end of the demo promises it’s “coming soon, like real soon!” and should be out before the end of the year. So please, stop what you’re doing and play 30 Birds. You won’t regret it.