This is a great game, but there's one thing that sours the experience for me to fully recommend it.

This seems like an obvious thing, but aparently 7 artists, 2 art consultants and 20 playtesters (counted in the credits) couldn't see this flaw.
Due to this, you'll have to restart a level, not because you missed a hidden secret, but because you simply did not see the collectible out in the open the first time around.
While I don't have any disability, I can't imagine someone with sight problems being able to get the collectibles.

Flying too close to the sun.

Introduction
The King's Bird is a gorgeously stylized 2D platformer; crafted around a single, wildly enjoyable gameplay mechanic. The game is innovative, fun, and challenging to its core, making TKB appear a shoe-in for fans of its genre. However, a litany of small snags and perplexing design errors keep it from hitting the high-point it otherwise could have. Whether it's floaty controls or stifling level structure, The King's Bird's faults come in spades. But enough chirping on from me, let's get into the meat of this review.

Presentation
First thing's first: The King's Bird is aesthetically stunning. Every color in the rainbow is used to accent its backgrounds; including lush greens, royal purples, and deep reds that make the environments pop onto screen, no matter what's going on in the moment. Animations, sprites, and set pieces are expressive too, breathing life into the world around you. In fact, with its clear focus on art-style, you'd be forgiven for thinking TKB was attempting to follow in the footsteps of games like Journey or ABZU. By contrast, the OST isn't up to the same standard as the graphics. The music itself is pretty good, but there's so few tracks that it gets repetitive fast. As for bugs, there are some, but they're so minor they're not worth mentioning. All considered, The King's Bird represents itself perfectly well.

Gameplay
Turning an eye to the gameplay, it's where the game's biggest success can be found. TKB's main selling point is its momentum-movement mechanic, which uses the physics and velocity of your character to fly through levels and solve challenging platform-puzzles at a fast pace. This uncommon idea makes The King's Bird a unique experience, and is applied in a variety of ways to complete difficult jumps. Speaking of difficulty - TKB is rewarding, but also unfair at times. Collision detection isn't the best, so movement can feel imprecise on occasion. Also, keyboard controls are quite weak, so a controller is near-essential. Predictably, the floaty-ness of a joystick compounds the issue of finicky platforming. In short, the gameplay can be fluid and fun in some places, but mildly infuriating in others.

Level Design
Great level structure is essential to any platformer, so I'm reluctant and disappointed to say that The King's Bird is actually pretty bad in this regard. I've already described the collision issue, but there's also a problem in how claustrophobic and linear the stages are. The momentum gimmick would obviously be best served in wide-open spaces to glide around in, but shockingly, stiff corridors make up the majority of the game world. This cheapens TKB's largest strength to an extent, as it limits the enjoyability of its premier feature. However, to be fair, the level design is decent from a progression perspective, and is diverse in how it makes you think of new ways to utilize your surroundings to overcome obstacles. I just wish there'd generally been more freedom of movement on each level.

Plot & Story
Flipping topics, the plot is extremely basic. You play as a small, presumably female humanoid silhouette, who lives in a caged society. She dreams of flight often, and wants nothing more but to cast off the shackles of her kingdom and explore the unknown realms of her world. Within the first ten minutes of the game, you find a way to break free of your city's bounds and fulfill that dream. Throughout the course of the game you rediscover lost places with little to no story content attached to them. TKB is all about the gameplay: the entirety of the narrative substance is relegated to the first and last ten minutes. Evidently, the story is meager, but it wasn't the point to begin with.

Double Vision
As a final note, I have one last criticism of the King's Bird. You may have noticed how I compared this game to Journey and ABZU, but then said the gameplay was difficult, and even infuriating at times. Here's why these two things are misfortunate: they result in a jarring contradiction. TKB's bright, relaxing, and sublime art design; coupled with its happy soundtrack, makes the game seem like a laid-back experience. In spite of this, a painfully obvious amount of effort went into making the game as challenging as possible (especially in the late game). The devs should have picked one design philosophy and stuck with it - either a dream-like, artsy platformer; or a puzzle-like, demanding platformer. The two ideas simply don't gel together optimally.

Conclusion
While I've been heavily mixed in opinion, I ultimately enjoyed my time with The King's Bird. It's a bit overlong, at 8-12 hours, but the incredible visuals and momentum-based gameplay are two features that never got old. Platformers are one of the most OG genre's in gaming, so it's impressive to see new, captivating concepts still being produced. TKB's many shortcomings are disappointing, but also understandable from such a small studio. Most flaws are superficial, and can be overcome with a bit of time, effort, and patience. In the end I'd recommend The King's Bird to anyone looking for a rare gaming experience - with the warning that it's slightly too ambitious and unwieldly for its own good.

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This one hurts a lot. I would absolutely love to absolutely love The King's Bird. The monochromatic palette, the minimalist presentation, the way your character's singing entwines with the lovely background music every time you start swooping through the sky. The King's Bird might be one of my favourite representations of flying in a video game, working as a 2D Super Mario 64 where you swoop to build momentum. When everything lines up, and you know the exact line through the level, hit every cue, slide on every ceiling, make every tight turn and careen through at breakneck speeds, The King's Bird feels incredible.

Sadly, more often then not, that doesn't happen. In those moments, The King's Bird feels decidedly less incredible.

It all stems from the fact that at no point did I feel like I knew what I was doing. The King's Bird, perhaps to its detriment, adheres to a no text rule—heck it doesn't even have a main menu, throwing you in right when you start every time. This means that a lot of concepts aren't conveyed all that well in the buttons-on-the-wall tutorial, and it doesn't help that it's a very open ended level and you can accidentally skip half of it. Devs, when you make your tutorial levels, please don't make them non-linear.

So basic things like the fact that you can wallkick off the ceiling or walljump higher by dashing as you jump were lost on me. Some things I figured out eventually, some I never did. There were entire levels I couldn't finish because I straight up had no clue what combination of buttons would get me there. It just makes the whole experience frustratingly opaque. What causes dashes to recharge? What causes your cape to recharge? How do you control your dash direction on walls? Why do I lose momentum randomly? It makes me appreciate games that use visual cues for your abilities—Madeline's hair in Celeste, for example.

So I made it through all three worlds—ironically the first is by far the hardest—and spent over an hour banging my head against the final level (half of which was spent on a single obstacle!!!) before I had to call it for sanity's sake . In precision platformers, precision is key. When you die, it needs to feel like it's your fault, and it needs to feel like you're getting better. For me, the vast majority of deaths felt pretty unfair and I never felt like I was improving. Every checkpoint felt like I just got lucky, that for some reason the same inputs I did every time had a better result.

There is an assist mode—basically a built in cheat menu. But a lot of the cheats are of dubious usefulness—turning off air resistance is just going to wreck your muscle memory, no? Anyway, it feels like a band-aid to a bigger problem—if it had more precise controls or more intuitive mechanics, the game, no matter how hard, wouldn't need an assist mode in the first place.

Regardless, I wouldn't suggest picking up The King's Bird. If you do, I wouldn't blame you, because when it's fun it's reaaaaaaally fun. I just found that there was a lot more not-fun crowding out those moments of joyful adrenaline, which made it a disappointment overall.

Annoying. Hard to manage. Poor and worst guidelines and instructions i ever seen before. NOT RECOMMENDED!

Noioso. Difficile da gestire. Istruzioni e linee guida scarse e mal concepite. Non ho mai visto di peggio. NON RACCOMANDATO.

For *nearly* the entirety of this game, I was amazed at how delightful it felt to play, even when failing a tricky jump repeatedly. The challenge curve is perfect, and the wonderful art direction keeps spirits high as new obstacles appear.

HOWEVER, this changes *very* abruptly at the end. The last couple challenges presented by this game are genuinely frustrating. Yes, the finale of a game like this should absolutely test the entirety of what you've learned. But this game grabs you by the throat and says, "You've learned nothing."

Do I recommend the game? Absolutely. But prepare yourself at the beginning for a hard-earned victory at the end.

Imagine a Sonic the Hedgehog game where you play as Lapis Lazuli from Steven Universe. A weird analogy but that's what the game was for me.

The King's Bird is an underrated indie gem. It's easily one of the more unique platformers out there, combining speed, momentum and flight in one thing. Flying, gliding and diving gave me a sense of freedom and power. For what it is trying to be, the controls are decent, somewhat akin to the flight feather in Celeste or Ray's gliding in Sonic Mania Plus. The game's atmosphere is gorgeous: a pleasant, aesthetic art style and a wonderful score. Its story is simple, short, yet effective; Obviously not a story-driven game, the lore's main purpose is to justify the in-game events.

Unfortunately, the game is not without its drawbacks. And for me, sometimes, these transformed wonderful experiences into frustration, impatience and anger. What I deeply disliked was the collecting part of the game. Not because it was too hard but because if you miss one of the birds you have to collect, you have to replay the entire level all over again and recollect every bird. What made things even more frustrating is that once you touch the level finish warp, you can't leave it; This lead to me having to replay levels just because there was one bird next to the exit that I just couldn't collect anymore.

Another issue is that the game doesn't properly teach you important mechanics. Other than the beginning tutorial, you're supposed to learn and understand how this game's mechanics work by yourself. What happened to me is that I beat all the levels my own way and in the last level (which is excruciatingly difficult and requires very precise inputs) to find out that I've been doing them wrong all along. Oh, and sometimes there are random difficulty spikes. Not nice.
(Yes, I know Assist Mode exists and I'm grateful it does, but the game recommending you to try Assist Mode after seeing you struggle is lowkey insulting. It's not that I couldn't do it, it's that I didn't know HOW to do it.)

The true biggest offense of this game is its soundtrack. Too beautiful, yet too short. Such a tease...

All in all, The King's Bird is an amazing atypical parkour platformer. It's sad that it's so obscure, it has its fair share of flaws but I feel like it deserves much more praise than it gets. I think that if it had a longer soundtrack, better level design and more playtesting before its release (and actually listening to what the playtesters think), it would've easily been one of my favorite indie platformers.

P.S.: Credits last for way too long...

I couldn't get the hang of the control scheme so it turned into the trial-and-error variety of platformers, not the momentum-based one I expected. The game doesn't even try to introduces challenges and mechanics in a gradual way like even the hardcore platformers do, it just drops you into an hub from where you can access challenge runs in any order you want, complete with ratings and leaderboards which certainly don't help with immersion. If the story and presentation were better I might have tried harder, but even those were subpar so I just gave up after four levels. At least the music is fine.

I believe I can fly!

Taking control of a young girl, all you wish for is to fly and travel to your heart’s content. There’s a problem, though. The town you currently reside in has been turned into a cage due to a magical barrier surrounding it. No one can’t get out and nothing can go in, other than the King. One day, you happen to be right there when he comes into the cage and follow him. Eventually, you find out what gave the King the ability to fly and walk out of the cage and take the incentive to give it to yourself. After a little argument with the King, you head straight out of the cage you despised to achieve your dream. From then on, the story steps aside for the gameplay with only hints peppered in till the end.

With your newfound freedom, you can finally explore the world outside. You have four Kingdoms you can travel through: Forest, Lake, Sky, and Fallen. These all act to hold hubs and wall art hinting towards the past, containing four levels each, that you need to maneuver to. You can’t do any hub, though, as the others are locked till you complete a set number of levels. Once you complete most of the levels, a Shrine will unlock, which act as a bridge between Kingdoms while further hinting towards what happened in the past with more wall art and a dream sequence.

No matter how nice the world looks, it doesn’t mean it’s free of dangers. Each level will have their share of spikes that will not hesitate to pop you like a balloon, bodies of water that our lovely protagonist can’t swim out of, and deep drops. To get around these dangers, you have a small moveset so you can get to the next checkpoint or to the exit. You have the usual jump, but you can use boost to increase your speed, jump further, or climb up walls if you’re just shy of grabbing that ledge or if you needed to be higher to avoid spikes on another wall. A lot of scenarios will have you assess what you need to do as you can’t just boost everywhere, especially if you’re between two walls. Can you make it above the spikes with just a regular jump, or do you need to boost? Do you need a boost jump or boost up the wall and then jump? Lastly, you have your flying ability.

I’m not gonna lie, even though I was looking forward to playing The King’s Bird, the flying mechanic made me nervous. Anything could have gone wrong to make the flying mechanic difficult to work with and thus make the game a chore. Happily, flying turned out to work just as intended. When first starting it’s pretty rough, but after getting used to it over a few levels it’ll click. Flight is based on your momentum, so the faster you are the further you can get. You can’t fly forever though and your scarf is meant to show you how much time you have left. This can easily be reset by touching a wall or platform while also increasing your momentum if you need to. Once you get the hang of this, the only thing in your way is precision. There are also a collectible called Spirit Birds that will hover throughout the levels. These can be pretty had to get, requiring you to have enough momentum to get them or being precise, while occasionally guiding you to where you need to go.

There are also a handful of levels to switch it up once in a while. When going through the level hubs, you might notice that some warps have a different medallion on them. Well, these are different types of levels. The first type is more of a freeform version as you’re not constantly going forward to the end, but collecting these statues in one area that you would otherwise get at the end of the level to complete it. The other will take away your flight and force you to rely solely on your jumps. These were all really enjoyable to play through and a nice break from the usual level.

I would say that the levels here are not that hard to do, apart from the last sets. It accommodates both those who need to restart from a checkpoint and those who are speedrunning. Even though you would restart at a checkpoint, you can still get the needed momentum to get to the next one. If you’re a speedrunner, you can easily get through it quickly and I even saw some paths that could have been a shortcut. Leaderboard wise, you can get on two different leaderboards for collecting all the Spirit Birds or just getting through the whole level. While I’m not sure if any of them were hacked at the time of me playing, all of the times up there seemed possible. I even had a six-ish minute first run turn into a little under 43 seconds on the next try and it felt like I could have been faster if I was flawless.

The King’s Bird does come with various assist settings if a level is becoming too difficult for a player. There are various options you can enable, from a limitless cloak so you never run out of it to being able to take extra hits before you die and even slowing the game down a tad. If assist mode is enabled, whatever time you get on a level will (understandably) not be uploaded to the leaderboards. So even if you might not be that great with precision platforming, this can help you through the more difficult parts.

Every area in The King’s Bird has beautiful backgrounds with their own themes while each character are represented by silhouettes. The striking colors mixed in to go with the area works well and some areas will even have a smooth color transition as you get further into the level. This also helps with distinguishing your character from the background, with the white flowing scarf helping as well. The only problem with the more bright backgrounds is that it can easily hide the Spirit Birds. I also really love what they choose to replace voice acting during cutscenes. The melodic tones work great and I honestly wish there was more.


Despite how bad I was at the precision part of The King’s Bird, I really enjoyed playing through it. Soaring through the air feels great as well as finally landing that tricky maneuver after a moment of frustration. Using the limited moveset to your advantage with each jump may require you to think about what boost you need on the spot. While the flying mechanic takes a while to get the hang of, The King’s Bird is a beautifully good title to get into if you’re a platformer fan or someone who likes to speedrun games.

In my ongoing and likely futile effort to write a Steam review for every game in my library (#490 out of 639)... it's time for The King's Bird.

I went into The King's Bird assuming that I would not enjoy the game, and I didn't—but not for the reasons I expected. I've played a lot of games over the years and have developed very specific tastes: when I see the term "precision platformer," that's almost always a big red flag for me, indicating that I'm not in for a good time. And The King's Bird, by all accounts, as as precise of a platformer as these things go.

So why did I buy the game? I'm a sucker for flying. That's it.

But when I started playing The King's Bird, I discovered it was a game very different to the usual, punishingly tedious archetype that more-or-less defines the subgenre. Basically, this is a Sonic game: it's less about precision platforming that it is about speed and momentum and lightning-fast reflexes.

Essentially, the player character has a jet pack. Which you use, unsurprisingly, to rocket through the levels—going ever-faster and ever-higher. The core movement mechanics are a joy to play with, and far more engaging that I've come to expect from pixel-art platformers. Nothing else on the market plays quite like it, and it's marvelous. Granted, I did have some issues orienting the thrust after jumping—far too often I'd find myself rocketing face-first into the ground I'd just leaped off of—but I'm inclined to chalk that up more to my own incompetence than any issue with the game itself.

In The King's Bird I discovered something I'd long though impossible: genuinely fun and engaging flight mechanics on a 2D plane. The sense of weight and balance, momentum and thrust, it's all perfect.

So why didn't I enjoy myself? Well, for the same reason I never got into the Sonic games: moving quickly through a 2D level means that the level is scrolling by very quickly, and since you can never see very far ahead, it's infuriatingly easy to get blind-sided by terrain. Terrain in The King's Bird can be especially treacherous, as it's rife with instant-death wall traps and bottomless pits that are visually indistinguishable from properly-bottomed pits. The game also suffers a bit in terms of level design, with many areas featuring wide open spaces that make it difficult to tell which direction you ought to be going: several times I found myself spending far too much time traveling in one direction, only to discover I'd chosen incorrectly and had to back-track to choose another.

But despite my own lack of engagement here, I have to recommend The King's Bird all the same. It may have some issues, and is certainly not something I could get into myself, but I have to acknowledge how satisfying the core traversal mechanics are, and how gorgeous the art is. Simple 2D platformers are a dime a dozen these days, so I can understand the inclination to dismiss them out of hand, but if you're looking for something unique I'd certainly recommend giving The King's Bird a chance.

before this game, I enjoyed Pyre, Transistor and Journey and thought that they represent the highest complishment of the game.
Until I played this.
Nothing touched me so much, but this game, in every aspects.
I have my personal rating of the games I played this year, The King's Bird is the game of the year.
Thank Serentiy Forge and Graffiti Games, you guys created a ture masterpiece.