Chicken Wings

4.5 clocks

What can be said about Chicken Wings? So much, and yet so little. To put it in literary terms, it is a surreal, pastel dreamworld in which chickens—symbolic in their capacity of winged yet flightless birds—are forced to confront their own incompleteness while relying, much as we must, on the postmodern salvation of personal sacrifice (as represented by the chicken at the bottom who dedicates his life to saving the others) blended with impersonal technology (as represented by the umbrellas that serve to replace the chicken’s biological yet useless wings). In more simple terms, it’s just a trippy-looking game where you throw umbrellas at chickens.

The game mechanics are simple—you take the role of the chicken on the ground, armed with a limitless supply of umbrellas. You run back and forth through a two-dimensional space while above you, on an overhanging tree branch, untold numbers of your fellow chickens leap to their doom. To save a chicken you must run underneath it, toss an umbrella in the air, and time the toss just right so that the chicken can catch it, open it, and float gently to the ground. When you miss five chickens (in other words, when five chickens die) you lose the game. Every now and then a pair of sneakers will fall from the branch as well—if you can hit these with an umbrella they will fly to your feet and give you a temporary burst of speed.

Sounds simple, right? Well…it is. Blindingly simple in concept, and yet pretty tricky to actually pull off—you have to hit those chickens just right, and time the umbrellas just perfectly. The timing is interesting—when you hold the mouse button down a dotted line extends up from your chicken, representing the height the umbrella will fly to when you release the button. The longer you hold the button down, the higher the line goes. The trick is that the chicken can’t catch the umbrella on the way up, only on the way back down. It is possible, especially in the early game, to just click as rapidly as you can, throwing umbrellas with wild abandon—the chicken’s bound to catch one of them. But this is far more time consuming than is eventually feasible, as the chickens start falling more frequently and you need time to run back and forth to each one. The best method is the simplest—run to a chicken, throw him an umbrella, and hope he catches it while you run to another.

Actual gameplay aside, the true reason I love this game so much is the design. The stylized pastel chickens, the blurry farm in the background, the soft, dreamlike music—it’s both cute and psychedelic without really being either. Great care has been taken with this game (and indeed with all games on orisinal.com) to create an entrancing atmosphere that, while it doesn’t really draw you in, at least gives you a soothing visual buzz. I’ve already used the word "dreamlike," but it’s really the most applicable adjective so I’ll use it again—the game and its design are very whimsical and dreamlike.

So, why do the chickens jump off the branch—is it optimism or nihilism? Is the player’s chicken saving the others out of altruism or the penance of an unnamed sin? Why is it that, in a world of pastoral ideals, the only saving elements are technological? And what does it say when the chickens must take hold of the umbrellas, but the sneakers—also a technological construct—are able to mystically bond to them? These and other questions must remain, for Chicken Wings asks but does not answer.

Written by Fellfrosch on September 10th, 2002