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Widespread love of quality word games has permeated throughout the history of puzzle pastimes. Whether that’s games like Hangman, Crosswords, Scrabble, Boggle, or more recently Wordle, there are limitless variations on finding joy in parsing together pieces of our collective vocabulary and alphabet to accomplish various goals. Entering the scene is a mix of many of those games in “Birdigo”, created by screenwriter John August (Corpse Bride, Charlie’s Angels) and developer Corey Martin (Bonfire Peaks, Pipe Push Paradise). You’ll guide various birds along their migration paths by crafting words using a custom “deck” of letters that you draw from at the start of every turn. Utilizing a healthy dose of Balatro-like elements to boost your scoring power as you guide your bird along a roguelike migration path to reach their final destination, Birdigo excels at providing a simple game concept with satisfying scoring devices and a “one more round” addictiveness that makes it hard to put down.
Using a constantly customized deck of letters, you’ll create words big and small to earn “flaps” so that your bird can fly between the stops in your real migration paths for various birds. Each stop along your journey has one goal: earn a certain amount of “flaps” (points) by entering words to score points. You’re limited at each stop by only being able to enter a certain amount of scorable words before you fail the run, and you can only discard letters from your hand so many times.
Amping Up The Wordplay
The kickers that make things interesting and provide that dynamic gameplay Birdigo has crafted are the many ways you can improve the scoring opportunities each letter or word has. Every submitted word’s “flaps” are multiplied by a “power” score. This Power number can be boosted in lots of creative ways, including by “Feathers” or “Songs” that you acquire along your run, or by using a certain word length over and over to improve its starting “power” multiplier. For example, if you want to base a migration run around submitting 4-letter words, you’ll start with a default 3x power score. As you submit more and more 4-letter words, that 3x will become a 4x, then 5x, and so on, and exponentially enable higher score possibilities. In this way, Birdigo utilizes a very “Balatro” style scoring tactic, which is designed to encourage adapting to which consumables (“Songs”) or passive bonuses (“Feathers”) you are rewarded with or purchase along the way. You’ll also earn “Seeds” as you finish your scoring objectives, with the number of words to submit remaining being turned into the precious currency. These seeds can be spent at a fun little shop every few stops along your route, or kept in your birdy pockets for use later or even for scoring bonuses.
One of my most fun and successful runs was made possible by a certain Feather power that multiplied every word’s flaps by the number of seeds I had. Pairing this with doubling my seeds at every opportunity when I picked up a “Song” that allowed me to do so had me breezing through a run up until the final stop. Another run was made possibly by multiplying my power by 7 for every 7-letter word I submitted. Yes, this did force me to start using my discards more loosely and dig deeper into my brain for longer words, but it totally changed how I played the game in that run. The more I played the game, the more I discovered I was only sometimes utilizing the full gamut of opportunities for scoring and multiplying available to me. This need for strategizing how I played each run became even more tactical once I started using different letter decks and trying for some of the many achievements available to earn. There are six migration paths and six different letter decks, which you unlock with various fun, yet challenging, methods. There’s also a daily migration mode that mixes things up every day. So for $10 retail, there’s plenty of wordy goodness to fly through.
A Birds-Eye View
Visually, Birdigo is just adorably pleasant. The colorful birds bounce, dance, and tweet with an absolutely wonderful playfulness that is just the right amount of fun and flavor. Every gameplay element on screen is crisp where it needs to be, and scoring, information, and control options are shown in comfortable, swift, informative ways. It’s visually pleasing and doesn’t go too over the top, but remains eye-catching in its own island-based pastel-palette way. My wife and I found the growing flock of birds accompanying us in the background of our word crafting stops smile-worthy, with each of us declaring our favorite birds of the bunch along the way. The migration information displayed on the main map screen was also really fun and had us looking up those paths and birds to find out more about their journeys. It would’ve been cool to have more real-life bird info on that screen, but the provided tidbits were more than enough to pique our interest and provide context to our upcoming wordy migrations.
A Song By Any Other Name Is Just As Tweet
It wouldn’t be a chill, relaxing puzzle game if it had a bombastic soundtrack now, would it? As such, Birdigo provides a very zen-like auditory experience, complete with lots of gentle hums and long, calming notes as a background for the light, harp-like plucking that accompanies many scoring notifications and actions. Letter blocks sound similar to how they would if you were moving them around on a wooden table yourself, and there’s a satisfying “click” to them as you arrange them into words. There are fewer bird sounds than you would think, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Pluck or be Plucked
As far as any negative feedback goes, I would say I do wish I saw a bit more variety in the “song” consumables I could use during my runs, as often times I found myself seeing the same few ones to choose from at the start, and then they got more intriguing in their possibilities as I went along my migrations. Now, maybe that’s just the game slowly introducing them to me, or maybe having too many choices would ruin the beginning ramp-up in difficulty. Either way, I gravitated towards the same selections pretty regularly. As far as control improvements, I wasn’t a big fan of being able to click over to the “Submit word” button right next to the final letter in my hand. I accidentally clicked on it a few times, and with so few words to submit each stopover and no way to undo, it could’ve very easily ended a run prematurely and accidentally. Also, the soundtrack, though relaxing and not distracting, I did feel could have used a bit more fun variation, and with the game being called “Birdigo” I still would’ve loved some more bird sounds or facts weaved into it in more ways. I did enjoy the creative naming of the songs, feathers, and other places where bird terms were used, though!
In Conclusion
Birdigo is more about the wordplay than the birds in play, and I think the birds themselves provide a fun method of delivering a fantastic word puzzle experience. With quick, 30-60 minute migration runs able to provide a satisfying, easily saveable gameplay session, I think this neatly packaged game is worth any word fan’s time. Deducing the different ways to fly across continents with all your feathered friends in tow was a treat, and I’ll be returning to the game on my own flights on my Steamdeck for quite a while.
