This game will most likely never see the light of day (outside of the few brief glimpses we’ve gotten from dev posts). All of the team seems to have moved on from the project. It actually crushes my heart to see so much potential for a great game, especially considering that the team working on it was Hitbox Team. It’s a frustrating tale of a canceled project that was born too early, and never fully bloomed.

For those who don’t know what Spire is/was, it’s a procedurally generated FPS with platforming elements. If you want more details about the project, you can head over to hitboxteam.com. It started development around 2012 and continued until at least 2017, where the last blog posts can be found on Hitbox Team’s website. Clearly a lot of work went into the game, they’ve even talked before about how Unity just couldn’t do stuff that they wanted so they had to build new tools to accomplish some of their design aspirations (a lighting engine, lots of pathfinding stuff, etc.)

The idea behind the game is that you climb a spire with presumably multiple floors. Each would be procedurally generated, with one of the most notable features being that it wasn’t really based on a seed. Player data would be stored on a chart of sorts and the generation would pull data from that to create a natural ebb and flow for the climb. One of the games developers, Lexie Dostal, talked in an interview about how they were trying to create compelling player narratives with this system, really interesting stuff. That mixed with the high emphasis on strong mechanics that (the best) Roguelikes have seemed like a fertile ground for interesting moments.

It kinda sounds like my dream game tbh. Dustforce and Spelunky are two of my favorite games, and it seemed like Spire was taking the best parts of each and putting it into an FPS. If I could choose one game to know everything about, it would undoubtedly be Spire. I still hope that one day they can finish it or release it in any other form, but for now, Spire will live rent-free in the back of my mind.

I played it. I loved it.

Kirby games aren't really the kinds of games that you overanalyze and meticulously pick apart. Not because there isn't anything of substance, or that they are perfect, but because the focus of the games tends to veer away from mechanical depth, and into aesthetics.

In that regard, KDL3 is easily the game that sticks out the most on the entire SNES. The visuals are genuinely impressive by today's standards, not necessarily in fidelity, but in art direction. Kirby always has striking character designs, but they are amplified here by the pseudo-hand drawn art mimicked by the pixel art. As someone who literally just played KDL3 for the first time, I don't have to consider the context of when the game was made when determining a lot of the aesthetics, which is something I can't say for many titles on the SNES. Genuinely great stuff here, which really amplifies the whole vibe of the game.

I've tried playing other Kirby games, but have only really enjoyed my time with this and Kirby 64. I hope that I can like the other games at some point too, but I think I can directly credit my disinterest in the other games to their lack of focus. Kirby doesn't really compete with other games in the same genre when it comes to raw gameplay, so the focus shouldn’t be on the gameplay, at least in my opinion.

This isn’t to say that Kirby has bad gameplay, but it's far from the most interesting thing the games offer, mostly due to Kirby being a franchise aimed for less experienced players. The other titles I’ve played seem to get right into the action and neglect building atmosphere. You can see the shift in focus directly in the power-ups as well, which have far more moves in the other games. Kirby controls tighter, the general speed of gameplay is increased, the list goes on and on of other small changes. In other 2D platformers, I would welcome those changes, but from what I’ve played of these other titles, they don’t have as engaging second to second gameplay, or as varied level design. Once again, Kirby is aimed at kids, so it makes sense that they can’t ramp up the difficulty, but this is precisely why I’ve found myself falling head over heels for KDL3 and K64.

Genuinely great games that don’t overstay their welcome, have enough interesting ideas to fill out the whole run time, and leave a lasting impression on me are few and far between. Kirby’s Dream Land 3 is able to achieve this with a much shorter run time, the unique gameplay gimmick inherent to all Kirby games (his copy ability), and the incredible atmosphere the game builds. I’m glad KDL3 turned out so great, and I look forward to playing the third and final game directed by Shinichi Shimomura in the future.

Black Bird isn’t a substantial game by any metric, but that doesn’t mean it's not worth your time. There are a lot of games with smaller scope that don’t get a lot of attention because they aren’t the “next big thing.” Most people’s favorite game isn’t a short 30 minute indie game, and I’m not here to say it should be otherwise. But I do think that games with a scope as large as Black Bird’s do get overlooked in favor of something more substantial.

Black Bird is charming to an extent that few games are. I would almost put it up there with games like Earthbound and Katamari Damacy in how charming it is. The pixel art is gorgeous, the color palettes are subdued in a way that makes such vastly different environments feel cohesive to one project. The character designs are as charming as ever, most of Onion Games stuff has a distinct look to it, and it's not absent here. The music is great too, ranging from old classical music, to new tracks in the same vein. It acts as a nice background since so many goofy and wacky sound effects layer over the music.

The gameplay isn’t noteworthy, but it doesn’t have to be. I heard someone recently talking about how Shmups have almost become synonymous with Bullet-Hells, and it really struck me how few Shmups are slower paced. It's refreshing to see something that isn’t as intense in the same genre. It allows the player to focus on the presentation more and fits better with the tone of the game.

I think Black Bird understands that it's not a monolithic title, and it's all the better for it. Onion Games really honed in on what their vision for the game was, and it turned out great.