Find your way through the strange world of Caged Bird Don't Fly

It is a shame that I can’t fit the full title of caged bird don’t fly caught in a wire sing like a good canary come when called into the title of this post, because it is excellent. It’s also a lovely little explore ‘em up of a game, from which you may take all sorts of meaning or may just find a neat diversion in your day, which is equally excellent in my book.

It’s a fairly straightforward ten-minute thing that sets you moving through different areas pretty much for the simple reason that you have no other options. But the areas are what is intriguing, particularly what each one sounds like. A central, gray stone room hums. There are several corridors leading off that muffle the sound to a stifling silence, for just long enough before they open up into colourful garden areas with quiet music.

You can, of course, hang out in these nice outdoorsy spaces for as long as you like, but to progress you’re going to have to go back through the silence of the corridors eventually. And…were those weird statues always there? Maybe they were. It’s probably just your imagination. I’m sure that whatever’s behind that gate you’re opening bit by bit will be nothing to worry about.

The game also makes nice use of chromatic aberration, or as I called it until looking it up just now, that thing that happens when you wear very strong glasses and look at an object so that it seems to have a reddish refraction on one side and blueish on the other. Which is not something I’ve ever been able to say about a video game, or really anything else, before, even though is always something that I have secretly enjoyed about being so short-sighted as to be virtually blind.

You can download caged bird don’t fly caught in a wire sing like a good canary come for pay what you want with no minimum on itch.io.