Tranquil bird flight simulator Feather soars into stores
High flying
Forget planes, flight simulators are now exclusively reserved for birds. Explore-o-soar game Feather launched this week, bringing a laid back island to navigate from above at your leisure. Take a breather and watch the trailer below.
Back when this game was a prototype with a longer name, Fruits Of A Feather, Pip played it and said she wasn’t a huge fan of the collectables in it even though the movement itself felt nice:
I think the reason the collecting isn’t so interesting to me is that it generally requires the bird to go near the ground or towards the obstacles like trees and so on. That doesn’t hurt the bird, but it makes you very aware of the limits of the animation and the secret non-birdness of the thing you’re controlling. When you slam into a tree and the bird keeps its wings out and is still sort of flying suddenly the sense of flying falls away. I feel like it would really benefit from having the objects you collect be in the sky somehow, or be hoops you fly through – that sort of thing.
Apparently developers Samurai Punk agreed, because now that the game’s out proper, those collectables are out, and hoops are in. They're optional, though, as you're free to go and do whatever you want. “The fruit are still in a few parts of the islands but they grow back eventually,” they say in a YouTube comment. “We focused on making a world worth exploring rather than arbitrary collectables like we had in the prototype.” There are apparently nine songs to hunt down though, which sounds rather lovely.
The world also now includes a surprising amount of caves for a bird to be making its way through, but when they look that pretty and are full of treats like glowing flowers and underground rivers, who am I to complain.
Feather is now available from itch.io, Steam, and Humble for £7.19/$9.99/€8.19.