The character creator selection is surprisingly robust and endearing to match, offering both an array of real birds and of silly hats and accessories. There's a thrill in discovering and exploring the bird-sized worlds of each course, and the imaginative ways that office supplies and fast-food containers can work in the game's context. One of the strongest elements of Skatebird is its colorful, cartoony aesthetic, something that is rendered in a way that feels immersive without ever becoming pretentious or overdone. The only real frustrating aspect of the game, at least in its default setting, is the erratic switches in the camera's POV, but that ended up being fixable with a few changes in the settings. There's a version of Skatebird that could hypothetically benefit from having some sort of course map or list of potential tasks on the HUD - but, again, the experience of exploring the game outweighs that frustration. Traveling around from one point on the course to another can also occasionally get tedious, especially if you have a specific goal in mind or the clock or a particular quest is ticking down.

However, as the game marches along, the limited mechanics can unintentionally create room for frustration - one quest resulted in me repeatedly falling in a tiny crevice between the human's toaster and microwave, and not being able to get out of it unless I restarted the entire challenge. New moves are laid out to players without ever being overwhelming, and the novelty of attaching them to certain tasks in the bird-sized world (like washing a stain off the floor or cleaning up stray to-go cups) never quite gets old. The actual mechanics of Skatebird definitely have a bit of a learning curve, but it's one that ends up being satisfying to overcome. At the same time, players have the ability to navigate Skatebird at their own pace, and ignore or abandon a quest without any sort of penalty. The quests are accompanied by cut scenes involving various other birds in ridiculous accessories, with adorably written dialogue that is sure to be memed once the game is widely released. While that narrative adds a necessary and endearing driving force behind the game's activities, something that developers Glass Bottom Games seemed to recognize, as the story mode was only first teased in May of last year when announcing the overall game would be delayed. The game takes players to an array of settings, beginning with a giant skate park made out of household objects in the human's room. After players customize their own avian avatars, they take up skateboarding to try to improve the human's life, either by completing menial tasks or just reigniting their love for skateboarding. SkateBIRD, referred to hereafter as simply Skatebird, lets players into the world of small birds, who are the pets of an unnamed and absent human owner who is busy at their new job.

Skatebird gameplay