Bird Song is a charming, simple game. You are a bird, a squat, pixellated bird, and your goal is to find sticks and use them to build nests, while jumping over pits and dodging spiky barriers. You pick up powerups that let you jump higher or jump off walls or I'm not sure what else, because I only got so far in the game. Whatever nest you built or passed last is your save point, and you can use that to try again whenever you die.

The simple graphics are charming, but perhaps the most intriguing thing about the game's appearance is the way it shows you the world map. Imagine the entire game map fit onto a single screen, as if shown from very far away. Naturally, you can't see your character or your surroundings to play. So the game distorts the map around your little bird, like blowing up a giant bubble on the surface of the screen, so your immediate surrounds are clearly visible, and it flows into the rest of the world map in a distorted way. Even as you play, dodging spikes and pits, you can see roughly where other things are on the map.

In the end, it's a bit too repetitive for me to want to finish. After finding a few powerups and expanding my exploration range with them, the amount of backtracking I'd have to do to check out new spaces exceeded my threshold. It's possible that adding some smaller victories might have kept me engaged. Respawning enemies for me to bop on the head as I crisscrossed the map, providing the opportunity for small wins while I was doing something less engaging, might've kept me engaged longer.

Bird Song, by the same creator as Roguelight, is available for download on itch.io.