It's an experience very much about the exploration of architecture by way of paint splatter, a fairy tale about discovery and fragmentary narrative in the form of a game.
Well, not in that sense of the term, anyway: Its bird in question has escaped a painting by the late mother of the protagonist, a young boy named Monroe, and leads Monroe on a wild goose chase through an idiosyncratic, dreamlike world. Perhaps surprisingly, The Unfinished Swan does not involve the flight of any birds. It's a rare, incubator-like arrangement: While Sony has published a steady stream of indie-developed PSN titles (the PixelJunk titles and Sound Shapes, to name some), Giant Sparrow is now only the second independent studio to enjoy in-house first-party status. The team also enjoys the same three-game publishing deal as TGC, which ensures Sony will have right of first refusal on Giant Sparrow's next two projects - meaning the company will quite likely be stationed here for the next six or seven years. Giant Sparrow inhabits the space inside Sony's Santa Monica studio that not too long ago belonged to the aforementioned Thatgamecompany.
We're at the offices of Giant Sparrow, the company Dallas founded some three years prior. "I think that's a great thing for art to do - to really exaggerate all of these differences, but also mirror real experiences in the real world." It's basically surrealism: the thing that's familiar to you, but also pretty crazy when you look at a little closer." Though he claims not to be an expert, birds have essentially become his muse, something of an allegory in his vision for developing video games. "At the same time, they're both familiar and a little terrifying. "The thing that fascinates me about birds is that they're the last bit of nature that's able to cohabitate with us," Dallas explains several months later, of his ongoing fascination with all things feathered. Though he couldn't talk about it at the time, this was a matter of days before the unveiling of his company's first game, The Unfinished Swan, at a Sony press event. Moments later I found myself in a separate conversation, in which Dallas explained the various complications behind simulating flight in games, particularly the flight of birds.
"Hey, are you guys talking about bird games?" he asked, having overheard a few of us chatting about the sensation of flight in Thatgamecompany's Journey. The first time I met Ian Dallas was at a mutual friend's farewell party in Los Angeles, earlier this year. Minding the many gaps of game development with Ian Dallas, creator of Sony and Giant Sparrow's upcoming The Unfinished Swan.
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