There’s a very specific kind of person who sees “you are a pigeon looking for love across five real cities” and thinks yes, obviously, sign me up. I am that person. Pigeon: A Love Story, from indie studio Wristwork, hands you the whole lot for a single purchase: London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo, each one a genuine to-scale recreation you can fly across at pigeon height, plus a secret sixth map that only opens up once you’ve found your soulmate in all the others. You coo, other pigeons turn from black to red to show they’ve heard you, and almost all of them tell you to do one. Somewhere out there, in a sky full of millions of identical birds, is your actual soulmate. Good luck.
That premise alone got me, but the moment that actually sold me on it came later, at gone 11pm after one of those days where everything’s gone a bit sideways. I wasn’t looking for a game so much as somewhere to switch off, and Pigeon: A Love Story turned out to be exactly that. You can land on rooftops whenever you fancy, just fold your wings and sit there, and the game drops into this lovely stripped-back wireframe view of the skyline around you while Madwreck’s score keeps ticking away underneath. No objective, no bird to chase, just you, a rooftop, and a very good soundtrack. It’s the sort of detail that could easily have been left out and nobody would have missed it, and it’s become my favourite thing in the whole game.
It’s a real slowing-down-em-up (it’ll catch on), the sort of thing you boot up after a long day and just drift about in rather than grind through. The London map alone, all Tower Bridge and Covent Garden from a height no tourist ever gets, is a genuinely lovely bit of game design, and whoever built it put in the hours.
That said, the core loop is fairly slight once you’ve clocked it. Cooing at birds and watching them go red is the entire interaction, dressed up with community-submitted rejection lines that range from the gentle (“I think we work better as friends”) to the properly blunt (being told, essentially, to stop making a scene). It’s funny the first dozen times, and by the fiftieth you’re mashing the coo button half on autopilot, waiting for the one bird in the crowd that actually gives you a clue instead of a brush-off. It’s a grumble rather than a dealbreaker though, mostly because the game seems to know exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.
There’s a genuine attempt to give this some legs, mind. You can play passively and let it tick along in the background like a very strange screensaver, you can hop into “Coo-op” multiplayer and go bird hunting with a mate, and there’s even mic support so you can coo out loud like an absolute lunatic in your living room. None of that changes what the game actually is underneath, but it’s a nice acknowledgement that the core loop needs the occasional change of scenery to stay interesting, and it’s worth saying again that all five cities and the secret map come as standard, no extra purchases required to see the whole thing. At a price that’s less than a pint would cost you in most of the cities it’s set in, everything feels about right for what you’re getting.
What I will bang on about, because I always will, is the soundtrack. Madwreck’s lo-fi ambient score is doing an enormous amount of good work while you’re enjoying the sights, swelling and receding as you drift over rooftops in a way that makes the whole experience feel far more considered than “fly around, coo at birds” has any right to. It’s the sort of score I’d have on vinyl in a heartbeat, sat right there next to the rest of my gaming soundtrack shelf, if anyone presses it. Nobody has yet, as far as I can find, but if Wristwork are reading this: get in touch with a pressing plant, there’s an audience for it. Either way, stick on your comfiest headphones for this one.
Pigeon: A Love Story is exactly what it says on the tin, a chilled, slightly daft needle-in-a-haystack game that looks lovely and sounds even better, and it’s found a proper little niche as my go-to for winding down when the day’s been a lot. It’s not going to appeal to the FPS loving adrenaline-junkie who’s bursting through doors with a flashbang while questioning a 16 year old’s parentage for hours at a time, but if you fancy something odd and unhurried to fly about in, land on the odd rooftop, and just breathe for a bit, there’s a genuinely special time to be had here.
Reviewed on PC
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