The Falconeer turns five years old next week, and ahead of that its developer Tom Sala has put in the work for a pretty big update. Update undersells it a touch I think, because it’s being billed as a full-on remaster, complete with a touched up look, and plenty of mechanical changes. So, let’s detail those details!

For one, landing sounds like it should be a lot easier, as you can land just by flying close to a perch without having to press a button. Speaking of buttons, the dash and acrobatics have been changed to have separate buttons and controls. Collision accuracy has been improved now too, with tighter movement to boot.

It’s not just mechanics that have been updated, your warbird itself is looking fresher with individual feathers and more detail. Its head stays leveled when turning “(as birds of prey do),” and there are now wing flexing and steering animations. Landing and diving animations have been improved too, and player bird collision avoidance should be less annoying. I’m always striving to be less annoying! There’s a long list of quality of life improvements, control tweaks, visual changes, bug fixes, and even just outright new stuff that you can check out in this Steam post.

Talking in more depth in an earlier Steam post about the remaster – which is out now and completely free for those that own the game, and is included if you haven’t bought it yet – Sala was quite open about the base game’s launch. “Every release is horror, but this one was pretty bad by every account,” Sala wrote.

“And let’s be honest the PC launch suffered in many ways, some my own mistakes biting me, some consequences of releasing an indie console launch title in a week where both Xbox and Playstation were launching their next gen.” Sala went on to explain how this is his chance at “doing it better,” and better reflecting a game that’s deeply personal to him, spending his free time working on this remaster whenever he could. As always, making games is hard! Nice work.

If you don’t own The Falconeer, you can try out it and its new remaster on Steam right now completely for free until November 10th.