Will no one stop this mad beast? Can no wall hold against its offensive? Is there any hope for the ‘umble indie game in this, our era of Silksong?
Well, no. Or if there is, it ain’t for Star Birds, the base-building and resource management game from Toukana Interactive (who also made Dorfromantik). It’s joined the legion of games that have scarpered from the shadow of Silksong’s September 4 release date, postponing its early access launch from its original date of, ah, September 4 to the less foolhardy date of September 10. Probably reasonable.
“After months of building, tweaking, polishing, and planning, we’re thrilled to say that Star Birds will launch into Early Access very soon,” say the devs in a post on Steam. “To make sure the journey starts smoothly, we’re adjusting our flight plan just a little.”
Toukana says the sudden announcement of Silksong’s release date, after years of anticipation, took it a little by surprise. Understandably, the team says it doesn’t want “to collide beak-on with such a massive hype-supernova. Both games deserve their moment to shine and we wish Team Cherry an amazing success!
“And honestly, we’re super excited to play Silksong ourselves, too!”
In a move that I—a person who both enjoys images and also has to choose them for articles—very much appreciate, Toukana even created a little comic strip to announce the delay, showing its titular Star Birds ordering a change in trajectory to evade an asteroid shaped like Hornet’s head.
It’s all very cute and good-natured, though I don’t envy any dev having to suddenly reckon with the jumpscare that is Silksong’s much-anticipated release. A lot of tough choices have to be made very quickly. As Ysbryd (publisher of the also-delayed Demonschool) founder Brian Kwek put it in a chat with our Wes Fenlon: “Even if it’s just a week, that’s a week that Demonschool—or any game still holding on to the September 3/4 release date—would have been cut off from building their own critical mass of discourse about their own game. I think that can be fatal in this saturated market, where every game has to fight and use whatever edge they’ve got available to stay visible.”
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