Late Bird is only barely a game, in terms of gameplay it's just rudimentary clicking around... because this isn't really intended to be a game, it's intended to be an interactive art experience (and that's a problem, we're here for games, not "art-not-game" stuff). While the topic is superficially about a duck or goose or whatever, really the developer is trying to be a psychologist and address social issues.
Trying to address social issues through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. Game developers are not professionals in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this can cause far more harm than good. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to push political or social agendas. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get sales by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
As for the "art-not-game" problem, it's true that games can be art. Art is where invention, imagination, narrative and insight come together with high quality craftsmanship to create something greater than the sum of its parts. A lot of terrible artists don't care about technique, and they're wrong. Case in point, if the Mona Lisa was a stick figure done with a crayon, she wouldn't be hanging in the Louvre, would she? No. Ultimately, this kind of amateur "art-not-game" junk isn't making art better, it's just making video games worse.
There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.
We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle.
The game is very very short and can be finished in a few minutes. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here is terrible, it's all just amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying sound/background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop it using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2024 (and this was released not so far back in 2022), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
Ultimately the whole benefit of this "game" could easily be achieved by watching a Youtube video of it... it really does raise the question why this should be on Steam at all. We're here for video games.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Late Bird is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
