A Bird’s Tale
Well the rando gave me another ten minute game, this one a brief platformer about a momma bird who has to find food to feed her babies.
…Okay, gotta string that out a bit longer. A Bird’s Tale is a platformer built around a single action button that has you flap your wings to function as a jump. What complicates it is that you only have the strength to flap your wings three times before you need to land and rest (i.e. touch the ground and you get another three flaps) with most of the obstacles built around managing this limitation. Most of them are of your standard “hey, don’t fly into spikes” variety, but there are a few moving obstacles that introduce a timing element. This initially seems balanced fairly well if a bit tightly until one realizes that holding down the action button causes the bird to glide for a bit (a screen about halfway through requires this), at which point things gets pretty easy as that gives you enough leeway to get past most everything with an extra flap to spare. Then to spoil the end of this ten minute game you bring the food back to your babies to find the tree the nest was in cut down, along with every other tree.
See this game takes place in Palestine and beyond being a fairly simple platformer it has a message behind it. Turns out Israel has a habit of cutting down the trees and other plants of Palestinian farmers, which plays hell with both their ability to make a living and feed themselves. It’s definitely something worth raising awareness about, and the game itself is unobjectionable if not the tightest mini-sized platformer I’ve come across.