Pigeon: A Love Story - A catcalling game

We got a key from the publisher to review the demo of Pigeon: A Love Story,with an interesting proposal: find love in a kind of needle-in-a-haystack game. The dev, Wristwrok created Faceminer an interesting game that brings up the discussion of AI used for surveillance and facial generation that hits home for me, but I digress, back to the Pigeon.

Pigeon offers to scale replicas of real cities, like Tokyo and New York for you to explore. The demo, available for free on Steam, covers only London.

At first, it is nice to explore the city and find its landmarks with a non-invasive background music, well after you get used to the mouse controller (I wish there were sensitivity calibration).

While exploring the city you can coo at other pigeons, some sort of catcalling, they will change colour from black to red. Occasionally, they reply some sort of no back, ranging from apologetic to calling you, rightly so, a creep, and I found it funny. Colouring the pigeons would increase a stat tracking of coverage of a quadrant in the map.

At some point, I noticed there was an autoplay option. The pigeon would roam around cooing at other pigeons automatically, making the game some sort of screensaver.

I had a hard time wrapping my mind around what kind of game is this. What really is the game about?

• Map exploration?
• Wandering around?
• Catcalling other pigeons?
• Completing a checklist?
• A fancy screensaver?

First, as a pigeon you can explore the map quickly, and there is not much more to discover after. Second, there is not much you can do to figure out your love, you just go around catcalling them. Once they turn red, you will never see funny answers to your rudeness again, the only feedback you have is the number going up on your HUD. Last, it is a dull screensaver.

If it was not for an option to enable clues, I would not know where my love might be. Clues would say: “Go North”, or “Go where visitors wander”, or “Good seeds there”. After a while, colouring all pigeons in that region, nothing changed. It gets worse when you hit +70% of coverage, as you can go for a while without seeing a black pigeon.

It is definitely not for me. As a love-in-the-haystack thing, I would rather have a puzzle to figure out where my love is, rather than bothering every single other pigeon in the map. And absolutely, I would rather not spend hours in a single quadrant scanning pigeons just for the sake of completion.

The menus were a bit laggy, but otherwise worked well on Linux. It is Unkown on Steam Deck, but it works OK and it has partial controller support. You can control the pigeon just fine with the analogues, but the menus are inconsistent, the landing page was navigable, but in the pause menu it emulated a mouse. It drains about 16Wh, and the only issue I noticed was a bit freeze during the spawn of a new wave of pigeons at the start of the game, it gets better later on. I wish there were more accessibility settings, at least to tweak the sensitivity of the analogue sticks. The demo uses almost 1 Gb of storage, what I found a bit too much for a single map, unless they have the rest of the game hidden there, it might raise a flag that it needs optimization.

I am still trying to figure out what Pigeon: A Love Story is about. But it might be for you if the statement 🎵I see a black pigeon and I want it painted red🎵 resonates with you.

Note: We were provided a review demo key by the publisher.