System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift Price at Time Of Review: £4.79 Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement) Genre: Interactive Experience Input: Tracked Motion Controllers Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing Multi-Player: No Age Rating: PG
Description: Paper Birds is a 30 minute interactive story about a young musician in search of true inspiration. Starring Ed Norton, Joss Stone, and Archie Yates, this VR film offers unique moments of interactivity, inviting you to conduct music, unlock portals, light up the invisible world, and more. This experience premiered at Tribeca Film Festival 2021 and La Biennale di Venezia in 2020. This film is brought to you by 3dar, the creators of Gloomy Eyes.
Review: ‘Paper Birds’ is an interactive experience in which you will be following the story of Toto a small child with a talent for music. While the animation style is worthy of a nod of approval it is the storyline that really carries this experience along. While it doesn’t last much longer than 20 mins (you can drag it out a bit longer) for that length of time you will be immersed in the experience and storyline. While there isn’t a lot of interactive moments what there is feels strangely magical. I just wish experiences like this were free so more people would enjoy them, but for the small price this is well worth a look, just keep in mind all the time, effort and work the developer/animator put into making it and you should find the value it seems to be missing. It does have to be said that it really isn’t much better looking than the Oculus Quest version, but that is more testament to the developer’s optimisation on the Quest than anything else.
