30 Birds review – a magical, kaleidoscopic adventure through Persian myth

The Night Train to Lantern City. Just saying these words out loud immediately conjures an image of a place with warm, hushed lighting spooling out of glazed windows, with billows of steam and smoke misting over the landscape. It’s certainly an evocative kind of opening, but 30 Birds goes one better, placing its detective heroine Zig on a train careering through space on tracks made of clouds, heading toward a city made of actual paper lanterns. It’s a dreamy and impossible kind of architecture, its inhabitants shifting up and down each lantern’s colourful panels and wrapping their 2D bodies around the edges of a very real, 3D space, with doorways transporting them to other miniature lamp spaces hanging around its periphery. The locals themselves are a little impossible, too, as you’ll clock sentient aubergines and disco-loving djinn glyphs, and, of course, a heck of a lot of birds as you saunter through the city’s various districts.

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Source: Eurogamer.net