At first blush, Ostrich Island seems like an elaborate joke game. Visually it's kind of a mess, your directives are not clear beyond some open-world tomfoolery, collectibles are called things like "Statuette of Egbert", it's very easy to accidentally take five steps into the water and drown, and the sheer number of minor visual and physics glitches intimates that the developers had too much on their plate just dealing with the major glitches (i.e. the ones directly interfering with the gameplay, rather than just adding to the overall level of aesthetic jank) to fix them; all these traits combined together makes Ostrich Island feel like something that fell off the back of the Indie asset flip truck that used to exclusively be the domain of Steam but are now all over Switch eShop and the PSN store as well. It doesn't help that ostriches are inherently ungainly as animals go; less majestic like its flight-capable falcon and eagle brethren, more silly, violent, and awkward. They're like lanky teenagers that had one hell of a growth spurt over the summer and are so full of nervous energy it's like they're never quite sure where (or even how) to stand still. In spite of all this, Ostrich Island has a certain moxie and a guileless joie de vivre that makes it a hard game to dislike. If anything, you find yourself rooting for it to hold itself together after a few levels, willing to pushing past its less stable aspects to see where it's going to go next.

Similar to the equally unfettered (and similarly dopey-animal-centric) Goat Simulator, your goals are myriad and set across large open-world-ish maps and almost all of them involve collectibles in some way. There's the ostrich eggs with the impossibly high bloom, considered the equivalent of the game's power stars due to the way they're directly related to purchasing upgrades; there's the golden eggs, which are instead rewarded for achievements (some are level-specific challenges, some involve a photography mini-quest, others for the usual milestones); there's buried food and ladybugs to dig up for score bonuses; there's a set of cosmetics for your ostrich to wear; and there's random items and treasure that fill up the ostrich's "nest" home. The upgrades tend to be non-essential but very handy power-ups like a significant boost to your jumping height or running speed, and the first is a useful (but not as useful as you'd hope) power-up that makes ostrich egg collectibles easier to see.

The ingenuity comes with the level design. Most levels are just non-descript tropical islands with a smattering of palm trees, chests, lobsters (apparently deadly to ostriches), tribal idols, and so on, but they tend to revolve around one or more gimmicks. Some have portals that teleport you to remote islands, a few levels have a dense fog to navigate, some are set underground where both low lighting and bats are issues, and one level even has you kicking chickens through portals for ten minutes. The basic goal of each level is to reach its exit (there's sometimes a second exit to unlock) but the real one is to somehow maximize your score for that level. Score is generated by finding items, catching bugs (shockingly difficult; those little guys move fast), random destruction, digging up food, defeating enemies (the ostrich has a powerful kick, though it's hard to aim), and many other methods that might take a little legwork and experimentation to find. A glitch makes it possible to max your score the boring way—palm trees don't despawn after you knock them down, so you can keep kicking them forever for a points boost—but otherwise you're working towards multiple objectives at once to hit that 100% target, all while the water level slowly rises and makes parts (and some collectibles) of the level unreachable. Of course, maximizing your score doesn't actually get you anything, but Ostrich Island isn't really focused on serious progression and hitting targets but more in letting you run wild and free, mastering the game by your own definition.

The game's difficulty largely comes from some deeply unfair mechanics, but even those too are part of its charm. The lobsters (and bats, found in the underground levels) are extremely fast and will one-shot you if you get too close, though sometimes their random pathing will have them just appearing directly behind you with no opportunities to elude them. There's the strict limitations to how far into the water you can go. There's the slightly awkward jumping that can make platforming an ordeal; though it gets better once you have the improved jumping power-up. There's the fact that the game loves putting traps everywhere, like pits you can't even see because they're underwater or explosive gas tanks sitting right next to levers you need to kick to activate. The game doesn't penalize you too harshly for deaths but you do have a limited number of lives, some of which can be restored by hitting score milestones within a level. Otherwise, you get three and then you're out, though you can buy back in by spending a valuable golden egg currency if you're that near to finishing the level with as close to 100% as your patience permits. Most levels aren't all that long, fortunately, and you can always enter a level and get whatever item or target you need for an achievement and bounce right afterwards if you left something unfinished in your previous run.

Writing about Ostrich Island after the fact has me occasionally wondering what I saw in a game so clearly tied together with loose string and duct tape, the whole enterprise threatening to fall apart with just a stiff breeze, but the charm of that goggle-eyed avian protagonist doing its darndest represents, in a microcosm, the appeal of the game as well. It's trying to give you so many ways to enjoy its tropical vacation; pecking, kicking, squawking, and cursing your way across generic tropical islands with some very un-generic and occasionally unhinged collectathon gameplay, fulfilling a wide variety of objectives both obvious and inscrutable while praying to whatever gods ratite-kind might have that you can reach the telltale bubble barrier that indicates the end of the level with all your lucre and spare eggs intact without getting ganked by a turbo lobster or falling to a watery grave because you put too much beef on that last leap. Ostrich Island is a trip, and for as frustrating as its messy construction can be I found myself equally fascinated (in a good way!) by it in turn.

Rating: 3 out of 5.