Ignore the Blackbird

Ignore the Blackbird is a creepy-cute puzzle game with gorgeous hand-crafted watercolor artwork and a surprisingly haunting story hiding beneath its charming surface.

The entire game takes place inside a single room: a family’s greenhouse. A blackbird perches on various objects around the space, inviting you to explore their stories. Click that object, and a minigame begins. Complete it, and the blackbird moves on to another object, revealing a small piece of the story with it.

As you progress, the tone of the game shifts considerably. While in the beginning you find yourself on a warm, sunlit summer day, full of brightness and calm, the atmosphere grows gradually darker and more somber, and so does the story. It’s a hauntingly layered tale of a little girl named Sonya and her family.

Some of the puzzles reinforce this duality in a very clever way: you are tasked with rearranging the same paper fragments, only to find that the completed version reveals something far more unsettling than the positivity given by the original arrangement of the puzzle. It’s as if Sonya’s innocent view of the world is set against its harsh reality, told through the puzzles themselves. The name of the game also comes into play here: are the blackbird’s revelations the actual dark truth, or should they be ignored, as the title suggests?

The game is intentionally short. A single playthrough can be completed in less than an hour, which makes sense as the game is designed as a prologue to a larger multi-part series. If you’re looking for something nice and easy that you can finish in one sitting, with an unexpected sorrowful and slightly twisted narration, you might want to give Ignore the Blackbird a try.