It’s pecking time! An adorable 3D platformer about a little bird on a mission, Pecker is a solo project from Germany-based developer Fonteinsoft. After almost a year in Early Access, this chickadee has at last left the nest and released as a fully-fledged birdventure. While it’s yet to ruffle off some of the rougher fragments of its shell, the (hollow) bones of a peckin’ good time are here ready to take flight. Peck peck.

Pecker feels like a game-sized iteration on the Pokio capture from Super Mario Odyssey. You play as a little bird freshly hatched from an egg, whose inability to fly is offset by an incredibly powerful beak that enables you to latch onto soft surfaces and fling yourself into the air. Most of the game’s platforming is built around this mechanic, tasking you with leaping between wooden objects and wielding your pecky little beak to victory.

There’s a vague story to the title, but it serves mostly as an excuse to go for a romp around the world pecking things. Your goal is to collect golden fruit to make a smoothie that will stop the “Blubber”, a mysterious ooze that appears once and is barely mentioned again. It’s not about the story: it’s all about the pecking.

Levels themselves are a little inconsistent in their quality. They’re each built around a central idea – help out on the farm, race down the giant snowslide – but often the implementation of these ideas is let down by some poor design choices. Your player-controlled bird is a very small fellow, which makes the enormous size of the biomes a slog to trek through. Combined with sections of backtracking and some overzealous fall damage, this can make levels feel longer and more tedious than they need to be.

Despite its rough edges, Pecker ends up as a cute little adventure that would be a good fit for younger gamers – particularly in its multiplayer mode, which lets multiple birds waddle around together. It’s not the most polished experience, but what it lacks in mechanical precision, it makes up for in sheer fun.