Project Songbird
Review
A Must-See Story Bogged Down By Fighting Your Demons
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Rock Bottom
You wake as Dakota, a struggling musician, in an apartment emblematic of struggle and depression. The instruments scattered throughout and the platinum record on the wall do very little to overshadow the mounds of cans on the ground, the box of pizza on the couch, the other disparate messes around, or the scathing song review pulled up on the computer. The foreboding voicemail from your manager feels like things are going to get worse. "But first, coffee" kicks in immediately, giving you the chance to fully explore this space. Dakota speaks melancholically about paintings on the wall, a picture of a clearly-lost loved one, and random other items. Words about albums you can spin, from real-life artists, are a bit more joyful, even if they do cross the line into Patrick Bateman territory through the game.
This short, open segment is a great primer for things to come. Not only because Project Songbird shows early on that it excels at dialogue and voice acting, but also because it carries forward something from the main menu and other preceding cutscenes: the vibes are immaculate. The apartment feels safe because it's bright, but the air is foreboding from the disarray, from Dakota's monologues about various items, from the impending call with your boss. Even after the call, once the call-to-action is over and Dakota ends up on a secluded island to bust some writer's block for a month, it's presented as serene. The gentle sounds of nature and the bright sun can almost convince you that this is all going to work out okay.
Disconnecting
Even as Project Songbird puts a great couple feet forward, I couldn't help but get thrown off by some of the early dissonance as Dakota moves into this secluded cabin. The game's early attention to detail make its video-game-isms stick out more severely. The little rowboat that made the journey to the island carried not only Dakota, but several guitars, a complete drum kit, recording and mixing hardware, a record player, and a crate of records, among probably some other things. Not long after, you start axing through 'Keep Out' barricades for no reason other than 'games have axes, and we know what they're used for,' and to show off what the eventual combat will feel like. You're also picking up scrap off the ground, revealing the crafting system long before it's narratively justified. For a game that treats its premise so seriously, these feel like fixable problems.
The other secluded island moments work much better. You lay down a three-instrument track that, no matter what you do, turns out absolutely awful, and it helps prove that Dakota is in dire straits creatively. And then there's the moments of simple exploration. Even though the act of wandering makes a concerted effort to reveal a crafting system that, even early on, didn't feel necessary, there are more natural, small moments of breaking out a pocket recorder to capture some nature for a future song. It feels like a cliche, but they're still moments that add up to making you believe the broad story, at least more believable than Dakota picking up random cans of screws to load into a backpack. Still, it serves to get you, the player of the game, the one who intrinsically knows to chop down barricades when handed an axe, and to collect all the garbage and singular bullets you can find, thinking about what is beyond the gated areas you come across and considering the puzzle philosophy it teases out in front of you.
Fight or Flight
Anyone familiar with FYRE games/Conner Rush likely comes into Project Songbird with certain expectations. Those expectations end up heightened when Conner breaks the fourth wall for the first time to speak to the player about how ambitious the following game was to make, though a message like that clearly implies moving beyond previous conventions for the developer. Case in point: the unexpected combat and related survival horror mechanics. It's a point of friction for the game, even if it isn't incredibly difficult, because it's bland and unnecessarily inflated. Equipped with a basic block and attack, there's nothing that truly resembles depth with the axe in hand, despite the efforts of the crafting table's ability to increase damage. Swings nor impacts have any weight to them, but if encounters were used more sparingly it may have ended up being a minor nuisance, instead of the slog it actually is. To make matters worse your axe can randomly break on a block, even if you just left a bench and the "repair" function was blocked for being unnecessary. Some firearms eventually come into play, at least giving you some damage you can deal in an emergency, but a full on retreat is the only option for at least the first couple encounters.
The thing is, Project Songbird already knows the combat is contentious, and speaks on it relatively directly. Most areas are clearly designed with avoidance in mind: small areas to crawl through, pallets to hide under, and bottles to throw. With the distractions in particular, I'm not sure I executed even one successfully. Enemies have a knack for seeing the origin point of a throw, versus the noise it creates, to the point where I ended up giving up on it entirely, and ended up just axing and shooting to get through. Whether the attempts at stealth were a pre- or post-combat decision matters little, it didn't end up working out either way. The game, as it seems to feel, would have been better served being a bit more conventional walking simulator-style that FYRE games has done in the past. The pacing alone would have been enough to carry it above past efforts, from a gameplay perspective, but also from that of the cutscenes, which are edited a lot like an independent horror movie. When someone says that games should emulate film, this is what I picture. Considered shots, showing just what you need to see for as long as necessary, that lead smoothly to the next, and less of the spectacle and flash that most games are after.
The Monster Problem
After a few uneventful nights of attempted music-making, Dakota's state of unwell gets the best of them when an orb of light leads the way into the forest, to an impossible door from the past which leads to an eerily familiar office building. This is how Project Songbird leaves the forest behind. The first time I encountered one of the game's enemies in this first area I didn't see it at all. All I got was a triggered voice line and some text in Dakota's journal, which had some particularly good storytelling in it throughout the game. There were a handful of minutes there where I got the tangible fear from the voice line and the vivid description of it in the journal, but no actual entity to apply that to, and it was working. The old horror adage applies: the monster is scarier when you can't see it. Because when I did finally run into it, for as well designed as it was, it lost a bit of its lustre. Especially so when I started fighting it. Each successive fight took more and more of that away, further and further contrasting the story as it moved along.
Now, I would expect a game that includes the carpet design from The Shining, homages to the Resident Evil series, and a psychological horror story to deliver on at least a few scary moments, and it definitely does. Call me a simple man, but a simple mannequin, in an elevator that you'll use frequently, that turns to look at you every time you look away, will give me chills each time, even when it's obvious it will never move. It's not cheap like a jump scare, it's barely a scare, but it's effectively creepy nonetheless. It's overshadowed, though, by a brilliant bit of game design that scared me enough to walk away for a moment. Without spoiling that special moment too much, it was a fantastic example of sound design, crescendoing feet slapping on the floor and exasperated breathing, as I was working out the solution to a puzzle. And the game forces you to overcome that in a really intelligent way.
Making the Final Mix
Project Songbird's best moments of horror, best moments of story, have nothing to do with its combat. They're intelligent puzzles that made me feel dumb while trying to solve them, and dumber when I figured out the solutions. Likewise they're moments of vulnerability for Dakota and for the player, as the two push against each other, which is also worked into the story. Overall it is that vulnerability that makes the story something special, and I haven't seen anything like it since The Beginner's Guide. Dakota is clearly traumatized by something, and it's working through that trauma that contextualizes everything. Making new songs to please the fans, the manager, who didn't like the new direction. Finding self-validation after the traumatic event, dispelling self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and a number of other very real concerns. Then Conner cuts in, more than once, to add the vulnerability of the developer to the mix because they reveal the developer's own self-doubt and battle of expectations.
After the credits rolled, and I contemplated whether the New Game+ option was necessary or warranted, it was the story and overall design that had me itching to press play again. Project Songbird gives up a must-see story, for anyone who wants to understand the negatives of the creative process, or who can relate, with or without Dakota's level of tangible fame. Just because the game initiates a dialogue about creating against expectations doesn't mean it needs to be given credit for doing so when the end result just simply doesn't work, though. Both the actual combat and the stealth options lack satisfaction, and look much worse in contrast to the rest. In hindsight, while the ambition was clearly there, the stripped back version would have been better, and still would have had enough for a complete experience.
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7.5
fun score
Pros
Great puzzle and horror design in several bespoke sections. Effective voice acting, journal writing, and pacing carry a great, vulnerable story.
Cons
Survival horror combat and crafting mechanics feels uninspired, and take up enough playtime to feel like significant filler.
