When it comes to art, choosing the correct medium to express yourself is vital. A story gears itself towards a book format, and if a more visual aspect is required, you can always add pictures to the book. In a game format, you really need something more engaging to the player, giving them at least a minor part to play in the story.
With A Bird Story, all you are required to do is move around and occasionally press enter or space bar to interact with objects. The thing is, there's plenty of times where the computer takes over and you just watch, like a cut-scene. What usually happens in these scenes is exactly the same as when you are controlling the character, meaning the entire 'game' could have been something you watch instead.
Further to this, there's not much to the story, meaning the 70 mins it takes to go through it could have been condensed into 30 mins or less, meaning it should really have been an animation.
There is no text or speech to convey the story, meaning a lot of scenes at the start of the game before the boy actually finds the bird are pointless. You see the boy at school, or alone at his flat but there's no context to his relationships or feelings in the world. Maybe he does feel isolated so the bird becomes his best friend, but it's basically just guesswork.
The story seems to be told through the boy's memories. The world he lives in seems dream-like because most people are represented as ghostly shadows, and the world often just morphs as he travels. He may be walking through the woods and you see household furniture on the grass. As he gets there, it morphs into his home. There's other surreal goings on like when he makes a large paper aeroplane out of torn journal pages, and uses it to fly.
The actual story can be summed up in a sentence. A boy saves a bird from a badger attack and looks after the bird until it is well enough to fly. I'm sure this story has been done many times before, so I feel it doesn't really offer anything new other than showing it in 16-bit graphics. The actual audio is well done and it does add a lot of emotion. The soundtrack is stored as .ogg so you can listen to the soundtrack separately if you wish.