A Bird Story is a short video-game in which the player controls an imaginative young boy who is ignored by the majority of the other characters and throughout the whole game; all characters except the boy and a few others have ghost-like bodies.[3] When the boy finds an injured bird, he becomes happier and begins to notice more people, and his introversion lowers.[4] The map is as though the game is a recollection of memories, instead of being in real time. The player could be in a park which leads into a hallway.[5] In a Kotaku review, the lack of dialogue was compared to the expression "show, don't tell".[5]