Firebird - The Unfinished Reviews

Just finished The Unfinished - pun intended - and I enjoyed it from the beginning till the end. It is a beautiful designed interactive musical experience with great audio and visuals. With only 20 to 30min it is a little bit short, but the story remains exciting the whole time without getting boring. I personally like this episode more than the predecessor La Peri. Therefor I am looking forward to next episode of Firebird.

Even better than first one of the Firebird series: better visuals, less abstract story, slightly longer(but still very short though)

Nice little VR experience. Good orchestra music and dance. It's something a little different. There's some interaction at certain times. Less than 30 mins, but enjoyable.

Short little art piece with good music and eerie feel to it, recommend it!

Very nice story. I would recommend if you like the art of dance.

A very beautiful, interactive story. The score is beautiful, the animation is beautiful, and the voice acting is supurb. Looking forward to the next work in the series.

Overall: An exquisite interactive VR movie short. Worth the price even though it is only about 30 mins of content. The voice acting is good, the animation and graphics are excellent, and the story is moving and enjoyable. You get to carve stone with tools and see amazing sculptures come to life. The viewer stands in one place throughout the experience, but if you have a large play area, you can get very close up to the action. The only thing I would add is the ability to free locomotion around the area where the story takes place to see it from many different angles. I think this is a very important feature of VR movies, and hope it is added later. What is great about this experience is it will appeal to everyone. It is beautiful and my favorite part was the final dance, which you can skip to from the menu to watch again after you finish the whole story. Definitely worth purchasing at full price.

Probably best known for their puzzle adventure game A Fisherman's Tale, Innerspace studio's earlier work includes two interactive VR dance experiences under the Firebird brand. The first was La Péri which is reviewed here, and the second is The Unfinished which features a story of two sculptors and an incomplete work. This twenty minute ballet spectacle begins after a museum guard completes his security sweep. Statues in the museum annex begin to murmur and then to move. After a time an apparition of the artist comes into focus and begins to tell his tale. You're asked to pick up a hammer and chisel with the goal of 'releasing' an unfinished sculpture from a rough block of marble. The story unfolds for around fifteen minutes - including a change of location - as the experience builds towards a final dramatic ballet sequence. The ballet sequences run for around five minutes of this performance. Excellently presented graphical avatars based on the motion-capture of actual dancers move before you. Combined with a pleasing visual style and graphical effects, the experience is impressive though we're not sure if this needs to be in virtual reality to get the most from it. In La Péri you feel immersed as you're positioned in the middle of the stage and the dancer's moves surround you, but in The Unfinished the dance happens only in front of you and we're not convinced that a high definition TV screen wouldn't work just as well. We also we found the story to be on the weak side and the interactive chiseling sequences to be clumsy and mostly unnecessary. Further, whereas La Péri was built upon on a well regarded ballet composition by Paul Dukas, The Unfinished has no such cultural underpinnings and instead repurposes overly familiar sections of Holst's The Planets suite that feel out of place and a somewhat lazy choice. If dance is your thing then you should absolutely check out both episodes in this Firebird series, though with the understanding that the ballet sequences are brief. Others might want to check them out to satisfy their curiosity, but unfortunately we don't regard The Unfinished as a compelling experience in virtual reality. ✅ Spectacular but brief motion-capture ballet performances. ✅ Pleasing visual style and graphical effects. ❌ Underwhelming story with no cultural underpinnings. ❌ Clumsy interactive elements.

This is excellent, not quite the emotional impact of the la Peri, but no matter. The Ballet scenes in this and la Peri are so good. I think the method of motion capture controlling an avatar works fabulously for that, better than anyt of the 360 captured ballet scenes I've seen What would be lovely is if they could maybe capture a genuine ballet performance (I do realise that may be a challenge if there ar more than, say, 2 dancers involved. A classical ballet captured and presented that way would be wonderful

For the price of a lunch, this piece of digital artwork is excellent. It can also serve as a showpiece for others to enjoy. Quality is spelled out loud in this fine treasure.