Casual Gamer Reviews: Project Songbird

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Rating: 8 out of 10 Note: Review based on completion of PlayStation 5 version. I started playing Project Songbird about two days after Resident Evil: Requiem, and here’s the TL:DR: I would rather spend five hours in a slightly janky world created with heart and vision than 20 hours in a slick, but soulless Triple A slumgullion that tries to appease the algorithm. What Project Songbird lacks in polish and engaging combat it more than makes up for in original scares and actually saying something. This is the latest title from Conner Rush and Fyre Games, who previously released We Never Left and Summerland. The game is a first-person narrative about Dakota, a hit songwriter struggling with both burnout and grief following the suicide of their visual artist brother. Desperate to coax another album out of his charge, their manager, Rob, sends them to a remote cabin where several other artists have gone on spiritual retreats to produce incredible work. The core of the experience is Dakota navigating a surreal and haunted woods in pursuit of new music. Or, is it? While there is a very good standard horror game here, Rush throws some deft curve balls. The first sign that this might be more than your bog standard walking sim with light horror elements was when the game started asking me if I was enjoying it. “Bit desperate,” I thought to myself as I answered a prompt to rate the experience about an hour in (I gave it a 7 out of 10, then). Later, I stumbled into a room with unfinished assets and developer notes, which I chalked up to an indie studio releasing a game that wasn’t ready until I got one hell of a scare. Project Songbird is both a game and a meta-textual commentary on artistic exhaustion. Dakota is played by the utterly brilliant Valerie Rose Lohman, who voiced the title character in What Remains of Edith Finch and brings a relatable sense of impending breakdown to the role. The character throbs with trauma and the weight of unmet expectations like an infected tooth. They stumble through the three main scenarios like a penitent, enduring monsters and psychological attacks for the sake of a music career that feels more like an obligation than something they actually still love. Their journey is often interspersed with short clips and messages from Rush, who sometimes drops into the narrative to speak candidly about the gamemaking process with similar thoughts about the despair that accompanies creation. There’s a reason “book hangovers” are a thing authors go through. Dakota endures these grim trials throughout the experience, but the horror is increasingly the realization that all this scourging just isn’t worth it. Let’s talk about the mechanics of the game for a bit. There are some very light puzzles and a handful of monsters, most of which are not much of an obstacle if you turn the permadeath off (which I recommend as being forced to restart the experience from the beginning sounds monumentally dreary). The main antagonists are these tree monsters that are fairly frightening, but can be handled with an upgraded axe. Tip from me: save all your hunting rifle ammo until the end. But then there are also these Weeping Angel-style monsters that take the concept to a whole new level. Though I never actually died to one or even got hit, being forced to play a sequence of notes on a piano while hearing these twisted things running toward me in the dark was one of the most frightening moments that I have ever had in interactive media. Rush really went out of his way to take simple concepts and make them deeply effective, as well as avoiding cheap tricks. I think there was only one true jump scare in the whole game, and by then I was so used to the mannequins I honestly wasn’t expecting it. Where the game fails is mostly, appropriately enough, in unmet potential. There’s a sidequest where you collect nature sounds to use as samples in Dakota’s songs, but aside from an intentional bad start at the beginning of the game you never get to use these samples directly in crafting a song. It feels like a missed opportunity to do something like what Lost Records: Bloom & Rage accomplished with video footage, engaging the player directly in the main character’s artistic outlet. Admittedly, wanting to be done with music is sort of the thematic point, but it still would have been cool. If the worst thing you can say about a work of art is that you wish there were more of it, then that means the creator did something right. However, Project Songbird does what a good horror game should. It keeps the runtime time down, balances the terror with dynamic scenes of relief and pastoral beauty and, most of all, it knows what it wants to be. Living in the age of elevated horror, games should have the same level of artistic intent as film. Project Songbird has that in spades, and I loved it far more than Requiem because of it. Project Songbird will be available March 26 on PC, PlayStation 5, and XBox Series X. The post Casual Gamer Reviews: Project Songbird appeared first on Houston Press.

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