Project Songbird Review – High Notes, Low Flight

Any creator knows the dreaded feeling of a block. And it really does feel like a wall of cement before you, as you yearn to produce something but lack the inspiration to know what that is. For some, listening to some music or taking a walk or a shower can help, but others can be stuck in that frozen creative state for months, even years.

Dakota is a musician who goes by the name Neon Songbird, feeling creatively stumped and unable to fulfill their record label’s wishes to create crowd-pleasing songs rather than the music they truly want to create. Their apartment is disgustingly messy, and they spend a lot of time trawling through negative reviews of their music, showing a person who is at rock bottom and struggling to climb back up. Dakota’s manager suggests they go off-the-grid at a cabin in the Appalachian forest to find their creative flow again – because nothing bad has ever happened to writers who decide to isolate themselves to finish off their work – and Dakota agrees.

Project Songbird is the seventh game from indie horror game developer Conner Rush and his studio, Fyre Games. It doesn’t just take heavy inspiration from beloved narrative walking sims such as What Remains of Edith Finch and Firewatch, but it also stars What Remains of Edith Finch lead, Valerie Rose Lohman.

But Dakota won’t just be battling their inner demons to produce the new tracks that their record label is demanding, as Project Songbird also brings in survival horror elements reminiscent of Resident Evil Village and Alan Wake. Merging walking sims with survival horror seems an unlikely combination, and certainly a difficult one to balance out – unfortunately, this is where Project Songbird started to go wrong for me.

Project Songbird is at its best during the quiet moments throughout the day, where it focuses on the narrative and Dakota’s progression in learning how to confront their emotions rather than turning their back on them. Dakota will often be completing menial tasks in between recording (or a lack of) during these segments, such as fetching water and exploring the area surrounding the cabin.

But at night, Dakota finds themself in a Silent Hill-esque dreamscape where they’re forced to chase after the dreaded red door that haunts their nightmares. Here, the survival horror aspects of Project Songbird come into play as we must either sneak around or fight enemies while solving puzzles. As the game progresses, we get more weapons until we have an axe for melee attacks and blocking, a revolver, and a hunting rifle. Healing items, bullets, and batteries for our flashlight (there’s strangely no indication to show how much charge we have left in our current flashlight battery) are minimal, which makes enemy encounters consistently tense.

With Conner Rush’s previous games being primarily walking sims, I was actually quite disappointed to learn that Project Songbird is a survival horror game – especially with its comparison to What Remains of Edith Finch and Firewatch. Unfortunately, my concerns about balancing walking sim elements with survival horror mechanics were warranted, as the game really takes a dip during combat segments.

Sticking with the slower movement that’s a characteristic of walking sims, Project Songbird is awkward and clunky in both melee and FPS combat. The controls don’t feel reactive enough for combat to feel satisfying, and it doesn’t help that there’s only two enemy types in the game. One is a hulking tree-like figure that makes a repetitive screaming sound, which was daunting at first but became tiresome towards the end of the game. The other is the indie horror game obligatory Weeping Angel-style enemy, which did a fantastic job at raising tension. These were often placed during puzzle sections that require the player to have their backs turned for some time, meanwhile the creature will loudly race towards you, panting manically with an eerie score rising as it draws nearer. It’s incredibly intense, though again the novelty wears off towards the third act, where it becomes evident that the game doesn’t plan on introducing any further enemy types.

Puzzles are another one of Project Songbird’s strengths. While a lot of them had me stumped for a while, assuming that while I had the right idea, I may not have been executing it properly, a lot of the time it turned out that I had misunderstood a word or what the game was trying to point out to me. There are some curveballs thrown in during the latter segments of the game where puzzles need to be worked around enemies, especially the Weeping Angel-style enemy, which will surely put you on edge while you’re trying to figure things out.

Overall, Project Songbird’s sound design is where the majority of its horror elements are drawn from. The screams that the wooden enemy type emits were incredibly daunting when it was first introduced, as you can usually hear it way before you come around to seeing it. Similarly, the creepy panting sound effect from the Weeping Angel enemy was also very effective and did its job of putting me on edge without the need for a combat encounter. That being said, I found the audio levels to be all over the place during my playthrough. There’s unfortunately no separate sliders for music, dialogue, and sound effects, which became a problem when I switched from headphone output to speaker output. Dakota’s dialogue was frequently drowned out by sound effects, and when I’d turn it up to hear her better, my eardrums (and my neighbour’s) would then be burst by an enemy coming screaming around the corner.

The soundtrack is a great mix of guitar-oriented tracks and dream-like ambient sounds, as though Dakota’s music is trying to push through the noise inside their brain. Surprisingly, Project Songbird also features a lot of licensed tracks, which you can listen to in the cabin in between hellscapes, though I do wish these had been used more during actual gameplay scenes.

To begin with, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Lohman’s performance as Dakota, as it felt like the cool and casual vocal fry was being forced a little too much and came off as really unnatural. However, as the story progressed and Dakota’s dialogue became more stressed and emotional, Lohman really shone through, and she did a fantastic job at portraying Dakota’s grief and panic, bringing her ordeal to life and putting emphasis on the more emotionally hitting scenes that wouldn’t have been nearly as impactful otherwise.

While the visuals did come with some unique editing to make them stand out, Project Songbird‘s level design feels really uninspired and boring. Especially during the dream world segments, they consisted of bland, repetitive hallways, often branching out to maze-like areas designed to make navigation difficult while running away from enemies. Unfortunately, when combined with the awkward combat, these sections of Project Songbird started to become unenjoyable, especially if there was no puzzle in that area. Lighting also became a big issue for me, and I constantly felt like I couldn’t see very well. Darker areas often didn’t have enough lighting guidance, and turning up the brightness just washes out the picture more, whereas brighter areas have a dream-like glow to them that makes it equally difficult to see anything.

Project Songbird is a deeply personal story by Conner Rush, sharing his own struggles with video game development and the pressures of meeting fan expectations through Dakota’s voice. While the storyline was predictable, the dialogue and delivery were done well enough to still hit hard. Unfortunately, Project Songbird would have been far better off as a walking sim with puzzle elements, as its combat sections are clunky, boring, and downright unenjoyable in parts.

Jess reviewed Project Songbird on PlayStation 5 with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.