Bird Alone
Developer/publisher George Batchelor
Format iOS
Release Out now
Stressed? Join the club. The human response to stress has always been at the heart of game design: for many years, interactive entertainment has worked on the assumption that we all react to adversity with either aggression or fear. Bird Alone is the latest game to foreground not our fight-or-flight instincts, but the inclination to ‘tend and befriend’ our way out of hardship.
Okay, there is some flight. This is, essentially, a philosophical Tamagotchi on your phone - but instead of an egg, you’re looking after a desperately lonely parrot. Unlike a Tamagotchi, you won’t have to regularly feed it or clean up its effluent (that’d be too much of a busman’s holiday for many, we imagine). But it’s a needy thing nonetheless: your new friend will nudge you a couple of times a day via notifications whenever it fancies a chat.