Zig, the protagonist of 30 Birds has an informant in the city who sent a tip via dream coyote, expressing concern that someone named The Scientist is going to cause some problems at the festival. Unfortunately, the tip is 100% right. The bird goddess Simurgh, whose inspiration comes directly from Persian mythology, is supposed to awaken from her 50-year rest today. However, just as she wakes up, a pair of ghostly hands reach out and grab her from behind, pulling her into a vortex of green mist and abducting her before the eyes of everyone in Lantern City.

So the main goal is to find a way to catch The Scientist and free Simurgh. Luckily there is a ritual that can be performed to help in this goal, but to perform it, Zig is going to need to find 30 Birds. This is what you spend most of the game doing, exploring the various lanterns and solving puzzles to find new birds that Zig can ask to join in the effort to save Simugh. The game progresses very naturally; exploring new locations always seems to put you on the track of a new bird and there’s usually a puzzle to solve to reach them. I never felt like it was aggressively pointing me in a direction and I found so many of the birds just by being curious and solving puzzles that I didn’t even know were waiting for me.

The writing is a lot of fun too, 30 Birds has an interesting mix of the traditional, whimsical and modern. Zig has a phone that she uses to track her quests and keep in touch with the birds and a lot of the dialogue sounds very contemporary. It’s quick-witted and very funny; meeting a new character is always a blast because it’s a lot of fun just to read a conversation in 30 Birds. Zig is very funny too and often the butt of jokes, particularly a lot of people think that her cape is lame and love to make sure she knows it. The first bird that Zig finds is a Hoopoe named Hoop who is a real winner – she’s hilarious, I love her.

30 Birds is stunning visually. It takes place across four ‘lanterns’ which are essentially zones that are explored in a 2D sidescrolling fashion, but the lantern itself is a 3-dimensional object that rotates whenever you reach the edge of the plain. Some entrances lead to smaller lanterns that can be seen floating off in the distance. Plenty of areas make outstanding use of the merging of dimensions and it’s a visual feast for the eyes. Each lantern has a distinct colour pallet and the art style is an almost papercraft look with simplified character designs and soft lighting. It’s an incredibly vibrant world that is lots of fun to explore and the soundtrack only adds to this, with a very cool mix of different styles across the lanterns. My only complaint on this front is that I often had moments where the music would cut out and then take a very long time to come back again, which is a shame because the soundtrack is so good and the game suffers when it has to be played in silence.