Birdland

by Brendan Patrick Hennessy profile

Part of the Bell Park series
Teens
2015

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Number of Reviews: 14
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
♫ Bird is the Word ♪, January 1, 2024
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

I never knew that when birds speak English, they sound like the lovechild of HAL and Spock!

Bridget's counting the days until the end of summer camp. The people are okay, but phones are not allowed, the food sucks, and she's never been one for all this physical nature activity sports stuff.

Also, she's been having these really weird dreams lately...

On the other hand, that girl Bell Park seems nice. Maybe more than just nice...

Through the slow escalation of the tension in Bridget's dreams, the horror of the bodysnatching bird-people infiltrates the reality of camp-life. The organic, off-hand incorporation of the magic realism drags the player along unnoticed, until it becomes clear that the "reality" of this teenage story has become quite unreal.

Birdland masterfully achieves a balancing act of realistic teen drama and creepy horror.

The core story is funny in its over-the-topness, while remaining easily recognisable. It acknowledges the importance and sincerity of the feelings and priorities of its teenage characters. Some of them are there to fill predictable roles, others have more depth, all of them get space and freedom to breathe, not squeezed into a mere caricature.

The horror slowly seeping in could have been a liability to the earnest depiction of the characters, threatening to disturb and overshadow the gentle and detailed approach to their relations in the story. It isn't. Instead it presents a carefully crafted narrative opportunity: to fade out the NPCs into mindless birdslaves for the second half of the game so the budding relationship between Bell and Bridget can develop more freely. Once they are they are left alone, the mind-enslaving bird-people trying to take over the human race offer the necessary obstacles to overcome together, allowing the romance between them to grow.

Almost the entire story is in direct conversational (theatrical) writing, with the surroundings and immediate events described in "off-stage" cues between brackets. This means the diversity of the characters' personalities is related to the player solely through "show, don't tell". The words and actions of the characters themselves bring them to life, not the author's descriptions of them.

The player interacts with the story through clicking options. Some may have hidden consequences (I played through only once) or are there only for flavour. During the crucial dream-sequences however, the choices very clearly do matter, and feedback on the results is given immediately after. Increases or decreases in stats are explicitly, proudly displayed, and later in the game some options are labeled as available because of a stat being high enough, or greyed out for too-low stats.
Still a relative newbie to choice-games, I found this overt "gaminess" quite jarring in the otherwise emotionally/socially involved narrative, a true-to-life (except for the bodysnatching-bird bits) exploration of a developing teen romance. I quickly got used to it though, and it was a helpful realisation that my choice of path was completely up to me, that there were no right or wrong options. I learned to follow my personal preferences, not worry about closed-off options, and work with the choices I did have.

I am very impressed with how Birdland has an effectively scary and alienating horror subplot that serves as a means to put the romantic main story in the limelight.

Great story, endearing and life-like characters, warm and romantic bodysnatching horror.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Birds only ancillary, August 3, 2023
by Rachel Helps (Utah)

I played this game because it has birds in it. There was not as much about birds as I was hoping there would be. The references to Bell's earlier detective work seemed oddly indulgent, and the portrayal of summer camp in general was surprisingly negative. The ending felt like it dragged on for too long. I was happily surprised to find the elements of the queer YA romance. The way the dream sequences interacted with "real" life was interesting, but I'm not sure if my choices actually mattered that much.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Lovely, December 8, 2021

It's nice to look at and very well done. The way the dreams slowly leak into real life until the climax at the end is fascinating and the build up of the love story feels very realistic and sweet. The dialogue, while not always realistic, feeling is very funny and I'd recommend this to anyone.

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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A good punch of Weird with a long drag afterwards, November 26, 2019
by Oreolek (Kemerovo, Russia)
Related reviews: ifcomp2015

Bridget is a girl in a summer camp. She sees weird dreams. She sees weird things. It's weird.

Birdland is long and it constantly repeats itself. The dreams have the samey feel and by the third or the fourth they are boring. Between the "ah, so what's happening" and "okay, let's do something about it" moments there is a good chunk of just.. hanging around, I guess.

What's frustrating is lack of character details. I finished the game but I still don't know anything solid about the lead heroine. Most of the camp girls are flat or you don't see them enough because the game doesn't care. There are good characters but they are doomed to be the scenery.

It's a decent game, overall, for its background details and the punchy beginning. The ending's flat, though.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Full of lovely dialogue and choices, September 15, 2019
by Greg Buchanan (United Kingdom)

“You dream you are the sheriff of a wild west town populated entirely by bird people."

Birdland has some of the best dialogue I've seen in an IF game -- not only for its believability, but how it helps characterise our protagonist through the range of choices on offer at each juncture. We get a sense of the way our mind works by seeing the kinds of things Bridget might do or say or lean towards, and even when we don't select options, the fact we saw them does a lot of subtle (but heavy) lifting.

The dream mechanic was excellent. We live vicariously in dreams and do things we wouldn't do in real life partly because we can and there is no consequence, just like we might do in a video game. The two levels of reality in this IF -- dream and real life -- and the stat-based overlap from what dream behaviour does to our state of mind, is really effective at delivering consequence for our vicarious, "wouldn't this be funny or fun" dream decisions. The skill of the author is in making us still treat those fun segments -as- dreams rather than somehow min-maxing our stats. And later in the game, as the dream logic seems to spill into everyday life, this plot strand is brought to its inevitably conclusion.

So much lovely stuff here, both comedic and coming-of-age. When we step-by-step get to make choices to write a bad sentence in French, or when I claim to my instructor that my poorly performed sport action is a "Lazy Susan", and they respond: "A) There's no stroke called a "Lazy Susan", B) if there was it I would expect it to involve some kind of circular motion."

So good. My only vague critique - and this is reaching - is that the pace of the IF led me to expect reasonably short sections broken up with choices, even if those choices just helped me personalise my character. So on the few occasions where there was a large amount of text on screen, especially those with huge paragraphs, it slowed down the flow quite a bit for me. Not a deal-breaker by any means as the quality of writing meant I was happy to read, but I think they could have benefited from being cut up a little considering their breach with usual pacing (apart from an excellent 'feathers' moment I won't spoil, which was completely amazing).

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
"State your job title." "Reviewer.", June 16, 2019

I'll make a confession straight away - I'm not a big fan of fiction about teenagers, and I'm even less of a fan of summer camps. If you are like me, don't worry - despite being about teenagers and set in a summer camp, Birdland is an incredible piece of interactive fiction that is enthralling from beginning to end.

It's a story of emotions and having (or not having) the freedom to express them; a story of youthful attraction, of coming to terms with one's inner nature; and it's a story of strange dreams and even stranger things within them.

The mechanic of determining what mood you are in - and therefore determining what choices are available to you at various points - may seem a little arbitrary at first, but there is a method to that madness, and it helps that the mechanic itself is hilarious.

All in all, a fantastic and well-crafted experience. Five plasma spheres.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Consistent and engaging, September 18, 2018

What I like about this game is how consistent its themes are. The effect of introducing the characters as a cast, complete with beautiful illustrations, is sustained by the focus on dialogue and the names of the speakers for the rest of the game. I got the impression of reading the transcript of a play, especially with the date and time stamps at the start of every chapter. The mystery introduced in the very first dream, with regard to the strange speech styles of the bird-people, is also followed through in the other dreams and eventually acknowledged and resolved. As a result, the plot was believable and I didn't feel like there were any loose ends untied.

However, I felt somewhat disappointed with the dialogue, which occasionally tended towards melodrama. While I realise that emotional scenes are characteristic of young adult fiction, the scenes in which the protagonist exhibited strong emotion just felt too rushed, in my opinion, and my feelings for the character were disrupted as a result. On the other hand, the dialogue options provided for the player are excellent. Many lines of speech felt appropriate for the situation at hand, and I was happy to see that the game both provided and followed through on these options. The ability to pick the murderer felt particularly meaningful, even if its implications were not clear.

Another area that left me feeling a little unsatisfied was the protagonist's toned-down reaction to the increasingly odd behaviour of the counsellors. Considering a large part of her unwillingness to act out was due to her lack of faith in the validity of her dreams, it might have been better if the bit about her dreams bleeding into reality was emphasised more, so that her initially apathetic stance would have had a more realistic explanation. Still, the way the severity of the situation was ultimately acknowledged and dealt with felt very effective, with the success of the protagonist coming across as surprising yet plausible, a testament to the author's efforts in establishing the rigidness of the bird-people as a critical flaw.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
YA Fiction for all ages, October 25, 2017
by Angharade
Related reviews: Young Adult

This is the first time I have enjoyed a twine-based game to the same degree as a parser game. The way the character's mood affected the outcomes was magnificent, unique and made me feel in control, even when I wasn't. The writing was sublime. I was not expecting to get so invested in the story, but the gameplay was so special and the underlying story so delicious, I had to keep going.

Minor criticisms: the romance between two of the characters felt lackluster at best. There was no real depiction of why these two would connect. (Spoiler - click to show)Bell is a frustrating humblebrag type, and the protagonist seems to be struggling with depression, which I really resonated with. However, the romance seemed forced, with little dialogue resembling connectivity.

I will say that the humor in this is absolutely wonderful for all, of any age, and that I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and story line. I stayed with it primarily for the dry wit. The portrait illustrations were an added plus.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Wet Hot American Summer + The Birds + Inception = Birdland, July 27, 2017
by juliaofbath (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Related reviews: bird fiction, comedy

‘Birdland’, simply put, is one of the most entertaining interactive fiction games I have ever played. Margaret, the protagonist, navigates a technology restrictive summer camp during the day, and at night she must enact parody-like rhetorical scenarios in her dreams for an audience of bird-people with a robotic understanding of the English language.

(Spoiler - click to show)A highlight for me was the pirate dream scenario. It’s not often I have actual laugh-out-loud moments while reading IF, so it really took me by surprise to find myself guffawing heartily at the mechanical remarks of Pirate-Margaret’s bird-person first mate.

The actual mechanics of the game were engaging and really helped build intrigue in the plot. As the two plots (the real world and the dream world) slowly became more closely intertwined, the mood-check meter began forcing me down interesting paths, and in fact took the plot in a different direction than I had intended. Although a bit unsettling, this feature proved to be both an effective method of incorporating interactivity, and of mediating the truth of consequence.

This story, to me, demonstrates what interactive fiction should be: entertaining, though-provoking, surreal at times, and re-playable. I truly felt as though my decisions had palpable influence on the progression of the story, and I look forward to re-playing ‘Birdland’ soon.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
A long, well-developed 'dramedy' about summer camp and dreams, June 26, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: IF Comp 2015, about 1 hour

This game from IFComp 2015 is, in my opinion, one of the best Twine games of all time, and certainly the best outside of the well-developed horror/darkness segment.

In this game, gameplay is split up between a summer camp with a slice-of-life scenario and dreams with an absurdist take on talking birds. As the game progresses, the two halves become more related.

The game takes a stats-based approach, with a twist. You develop statistics at night during your dreams; in the day, it affects what options you have for various activities. At first, I felt like the stats didn't matter, because scene follows scene in the same order regardless of your actions. However, on replay, I found that some of the best material is contained in stats-enabled actions.

This story is long and has several surprising turns. It's split into several days, each of which can be accessed independently in case you can't finish in one sitting. Because stats seem to be reset each night, I don't think you lose anything just skipping ahead.

The game includes some mild summer-camp-normal sexual references near the beginning, and one branch of one scene contains strong profanity.

Recommended for everyone.

Edit: When I played through again, I counted the distinct pages I viewed, and I took 234 choices/pages to complete the game.

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