The Day I Became a Bird

The Day I Became a Bird is based on the children’s picture book of the same name, written by Ingrid Chabbert and illustrated by Raúl Nieto. Despite being aimed at kids between 4 and 7 years old, it tells an emotional story that is universal for all ages: the tenderness of first love. The kind that arrives without warning and turns ordinary days into something brimming with life, enthusiasm, and the hopeful anticipation of one more glance from the person who stole your heart.

This is exactly the emotion the game sets out to capture: a love full of purity, untouched by the heartbreaks that would later teach you to hold something back. It follows a young boy named Frank, who one day falls for his classmate Sylvia. She is fond of birds; she wears bird-shaped hair accessories, she draws birds in chalk on the school ground, or she simply watches them through her binoculars. But she doesn’t notice our lovestruck protagonist. To earn even one glance from her, he decides to craft himself a bird costume. The game unfolds across 4 days in his life, from the moment he falls in love to the crafting of the costume and the events that follow.

It plays as an interactive storybook, with light puzzles scattered throughout. Minigames include jigsaw puzzles with rotatable square pieces and a ring course where you collect feathers. Outside of these, you control Frank from an isometric perspective, exploring room-sized levels and gathering feathers while interacting with the world beyond what the story strictly requires. Some interactions involve brief QTE sequences where you stop a slider at the right position, though the timed inputs can be swapped for a simple button press in the settings menu.

The game is very short; it can be completed in under two hours. Achievements are awarded for collecting all feathers across the four levels (one per day), with one extra missable achievement for interacting with your cute pet in three specific moments. The Steam release also includes a 15-minute short film that retells the story in a more narrative form, adding scenes that fill in the gaps between what the game itself shows you.

The Day I Became a Bird is designed to be a deeply relaxed experience, and a number of thoughtful quality-of-life features support this. A chapter selection menu lets you replay individual subscenes to track down missed feathers or achievements, and the game remembers which feathers you’ve already collected, so you only need to pick up what’s missing. The ring course minigame keeps generating new rings until you’ve collected enough, so missing them has no negative consequences. In fact, collecting all the feathers requires intentionally skipping many rings, as they are placed sparsely in between. Like the rings, feathers are also generated indefinitely until the minigame’s goal is reached, at which point the ending segment of the course plays out. This is handled subtly, giving the impression that you can glide through the rings as long as you like, free from any pressure or penalty.

The hand-drawn artwork also deserves praise. It is soft and warm, much like everything else in the game. It really feels like reading a cozy bedtime story about first love.

Overall, The Day I Became a Bird is a true gem: beautiful and candid, just as first love is. Looking back at those times, what strikes us most isn’t the person we loved but the version of ourselves we were then: brave enough to do something silly for one glance across the room and utterly convinced that a feeling this beautiful could only last forever. That essence is exactly what this game effortlessly captures through its heartwarming narrative.