Birds Watching (on Steam here) is a one-hour walking sim about a man who talks to birds while an apocalyptic disaster unfolds around him.

As an unending fire engulfs the world, a lone man takes refuge at the top of a mountain. For all he knows, he’s the only human left alive on earth, so he makes the best of a bad situation and does his best to survive in the company of the birds who have fled to the last unburned peak.

The man’s solitude is alleviated by an owl who not only befriends him but begins speaking with him. Birds can speak and understand human languages, the owl explains, and the man only needs to share a special password to initiate conversations. If he can observe and talk with the other birds on the mountain, something good will surely come of it.

The man realizes that he’ll need more concrete support when he receives a transmission on his portable radio. It turns out that other humans have survived the fire, violent and mutated though they may be. Their warlord has learned of the sanctuary on the mountain, and he’s on his way. The man can prepare to welcome him by surrendering his house and food, or he can expect to be swiftly killed.

The birds might indeed be able to help repel the warlord’s invasion, but they hate you. And they aren’t shy about telling you this. Though it’s not a challenge to discover new birds and observe them through your binoculars, it will be difficult to get them to trust you. Your companion owl helpfully suggests that you prove your sincerity by making yourself more like a bird. This process begins (relatively) innocuously when you eat a handful of the worms that you use to attract birds to the various feeders scattered across the mountain, but it escalates into genuine body horror if you follow it through to its conclusion.

Even without the humiliation rituals, there’s plenty of dread in the environment, which is filled with smoke and ash from the fire burning below. Though the forest scenery seems pleasant enough, the air is never clear, and it’s easy to imagine any number of things lurking at the edges of your visibility.

These vague fears are realized when the promised invasion of the mountain actually occurs. The appearance of the humans who have survived the fire is an unpleasant surprise, to say the least. It doesn’t help that these encounters occur in tense situations when your stamina meter is already depleted.

And then, on top of all that, you’ll eventually notice something else through the smoke haze: while you’ve been watching birds, something terrible has been watching you.

There are three possible endings to the game, and they’re all deeply upsetting. These endings follow naturally from your dialogue choices – whether you resist or capitulate to the warlord, and how far you’re willing to go to satisfy the birds.

Thankfully, nothing is dependent on being a completionist about filling in your bird watching notebook. You’ll probably want to find as many birds as possible, though, simply because your conversations with them are so unapologetically horrible and bitchy that they’re kind of funny. Once you figure out what the password you use to talk with the birds actually means, this knowledge adds a deeper level of psychological horror that’s fun to explore.

Since a leisurely run through the game only takes a little less than an hour, I went back and played it twice. Though the slightly murky lo-fi graphics caused a bit of trouble during my first playthrough, I appreciated the unique texture of the visual atmosphere more the second time around, when I was able to find significantly more birds to talk with. The alternate reading of the game suggested by a reveal toward the end casts all the conversations in an interesting new light that’s worth a second playthrough to appreciate.