The Night Train to Lantern City. Just saying these words out loud immediately conjures an image of a place with warm, hushed lighting spooling out of glazed windows, with billows of steam and smoke misting over the landscape. It’s certainly an evocative kind of opening, but 30 Birds goes one better, placing its detective heroine Zig on a train careering through space on tracks made of clouds, heading toward a city made of actual paper lanterns. It’s a dreamy and impossible kind of architecture, its inhabitants shifting up and down each lantern’s colourful panels and wrapping their 2D bodies around the edges of a very real, 3D space, with doorways transporting them to other miniature lamp spaces hanging around its periphery. The locals themselves are a little impossible, too, as you’ll clock sentient aubergines and disco-loving djinn glyphs, and, of course, a heck of a lot of birds as you saunter through the city’s various districts.
30 Birds reviewDeveloper: Ram Ram Games, Business Goose StudiosPublisher: Arte FrancePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on 28th November on PC (Steam)
Persian mythology sits at the heart of 30 Birds, and the reason Zig’s been called here in the first place is to witness the awakening of Simurgh, an enormous phoenix-like creature whose god-like status in both real-world legend and in the game forms the backbone of this fantastical tale. Here, Simurgh is the creator of Lantern City, and has been asleep for the past fifty years, dreaming of what to do next with her magical creation. But when the awakening ceremony goes awry and Simurgh gets captured by a mysterious being known only as ‘The Scientist’, Zig sets off on a quest to free her by bringing together the titular avian individuals who can help save her (as Simurgh itself can also be translated as ‘thirty birds’).
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But 30 Birds isn’t just some linear A to B hero’s quest adventure. After that initial inciting event sees Zig paired with her first feathered collaborator – a sassy hoopoe called Hoop – you’re more or less free to wander the city however you wish, peeling back its layers and generally noodling through at your own pace. Locals will occasionally give you clues and hints about where you can find certain birds, but after that you’ll need to follow your nose and sense of curiosity – which isn’t exactly hard when Lantern City is so immediately enticing to look at.