“Bird Of Passage” by Space Backyard (Alessandro Arcidiacono, Simone Tranchina, Maddalena Grattarola & Gianluca Pandolfo) & Emilio Pozzolini.
“[A] free night ride across Tokyo. By playing it, you will be granted access to the private conversations between a quirky passenger and the taxi drivers he will encounter en route. Listen carefully and help him find his path…”
Memories are a peculiar thing. They can fade away, but at the same time they can haunt us our whole life. In “Bird Of Passage”, the memories of the main character get revealed just step by step with the help of conversations with taxi drivers. You will play as a lost soul in the middle of the night, and I mean that quite literally: The protagonist is not an alive person, but a spirit between the worlds, or to be more precise, a yōkai.
The entity with the enormous eye actually was a human once. Thanks to the chats it gets clear that he lived until 1923, the year of the disastrous Great Kantō earthquake. Night for night he just stands at the taxi stations and waits for another car to pick him up, to make his thoughts a little clearer. While he knows that he must travel somewhere, he is not sure of the location itself. Maybe, just maybe, this night will be different.
“Bird Of Passage” is an atmospherical mashup of the interactive novel genre and puzzle games. Your encounters with four different taxi drivers will help you to progress in the story. Whenever you finished your chat with the last one, the cycle repeats. Do not worry: Even though the beginnings of the dialogues get repeated too, you are always able to find out some new interesting information about the yōkai and his past, Japan’s history, the beauty of nature and life itself by choosing other answers. Just as the colors of the trees in each of the four seasons is predictable, the four conversations show a specific pattern as well. You are most welcome to try out this stunning storytelling experience by yourself. [PLAY]
