The Girl of Glass – A Summer Bird’s Tale is an indie title developed by Markus Oljemark. It is a point-and-click adventure that features the journey of a girl called Kristal who is working in a circus but wants to explore the world outside and sets out looking for an adventure. The game has been under development for nearly 5 years now and after playing its early preview build, I can say that this game has been developed with great love and passion. This is our preview of The Girl of Glass – A Summer Bird’s Tale in which we explore a circus and battle a vicious cat with a broom.
The Girl of Glass – A Summer Bird’s Tale follows the story of Kristal. Kristal is the Girl of Glass who is working as a helper at a circus that refuses to move from one place to another. This lack of movement has made the circus lose nearly all of its performers as it has become stale and unproductive. With the circus on its last breath and the local sheriff threatening to shut it down, we step in the shoes of Kristal who has her own plans for the future and it certainly does not include the circus that she is currently working in.
Most of the gameplay of The Girl of Glass – A Summer Bird’s Tale involves you looking around the screens trying to find all of the interactable items. As compared to other recent point-and-click games, the items that you can interact with are somewhat low but it is not too worrying. It only makes it much simpler and accessible for players to progress in the game and solve puzzles much more easily. The items are not marked on the screen in any way until you find them yourself. While the dialogue-only POIs disappear, the POIs from where you can still get something useful remain marked with a question mark until you obtain that item.
Each game screen offers a variety of items that you can interact with. As you move the cursor around, the items that you can interact with get a white outline around them giving you a hint that you should check it out. With the unique art style of the game, these items are extremely well integrated into the background, unlike some games where the POIs are somewhat brighter or appear to be standing out from the background. This particular mechanic forces you to scan each screen extremely carefully in order to find and locate all of the items so that you can interact with them.
Progress in the game is mostly locked behind solving puzzles. Most of the puzzles simply require you to find the correct items and bringing them to the right people or the right place. The main thing is to find the required items because, in order to find the right item, you will sometimes have to find many more items and please many more people in the game. This certainly means plenty of backtracking as well but it is not that annoying. The world of The Girl of Glass is pretty interesting and it surely has its aesthetics that makes backtracking worthwhile. The cutscenes are narrative and you can make your own choice of dialogue as well however the dialogue and cutscenes between combat sequences were not really up to my taste as that made me lose my focus.
One thing you can certainly look forward it the beautiful art design of the game. I loved the environments and the overall aesthetic of the game. For a point-and-click game, visuals play a vital role since you will be spending literally all of the time gazing at the environment trying to solve puzzles and find items. The Girl of Glass does not disappoint in this particular manner in any way. The animations might not be top-notch but I can certainly vouch for the art design of the game that looks really good. The characters are designed very well as well. You have the glassy look of Kristal and the crooked look of the Tall Lady with the grumpy cat and tons of other characters that you encounter on your journey.
One thing that I was not much of a fan while playing the game is its turn-based combat system. While I’ve not seen many point-and-click games come with a turn-based system, this one surely does and for me, it was my least favorite mechanic of the game as it would bring the story to a halt unless you clear these clunky fights. While these fights start off really easy, as you progress in the game, you are introduced to more and more advanced combat mechanics that make the combat more of a luck-based system rather than skill. You would be doing really good but suddenly the opponent will use a move that will restore their health more than you and you will be defeated without any chance of winning the fight back.
While you get the basic attacks in the game such as the fast attack, near attack, and far attack, the main game lies in more advanced mechanics such as using Defense and Focus to your advantage. Defense will allow you to block enemy attacks and at the same time reduce incoming damage. Focus will allow you stack an extra attack in your queue by wasting a move however this does not always work out for you because you waste a move when you could have attacked and then you attack twice and deal the same amount of damage in one move rather than two separate moves which renders it useless. While it may make more sense to you, for me, the combat is the weakest mechanic of the game.
The preview build that I received was still an early access build so a lot of features were absent from the build that will be present in the full game. For example, the preview build has no controller support but the full game will ship with full controller support so that fans who prefer controllers, can experience the game with a controller. For me, the best way to experience point-and-click titles is via a keyboard and the mouse so I was all set. Technically, I did not experience any sort of glitch or bug as well which showed the game is pretty well optimized as well. However, I did only find low visual settings while starting the game despite me running the game on a fairly powerful Ryzen 7 with 2070 Super system.
While the preview build I played for this particular preview only gave me access to the first half of the game, it was enough to make me say that The Girl of Glass – A Summer Bird’s Tale is a promising upcoming title. The art design is beautiful, the character design is good and the story is intriguing enough to keep you coming back for more. While I do have my concerns over the combat system of the game but then again, this is not the final release of the game and we can expect it to be much better in the full release. On the whole, The Girl of Glass – A Summer Bird’s Tale is a promising point-and-click adventure that offers good puzzle solving and a brilliant cast of characters and we cannot wait to play it when it comes out. For the fans of point-and-click adventure games, this is going to be a solid addition to their library.
