The games industry seems to have run a-fowl of a strange trend as of late, with multiple upcoming AAA titles featuring belligerent chickens. This flock of games includes the Fable reboot, Krafton’s Project Windless, and the recently announced Pokemon Winds and Pokemon Waves.
Chickens have long been a staple in the Fable series, with the classic RPGs allowing players to kick them as a gag. The first game even featured a chicken-kicking competition for the particularly sadistic. Punting any chickens in the upcoming Fable reboot from Playground Games can actually factor into the title’s complex morality system.
And the game, which releases in late 2026, also features a new Cockatrice enemy type, a giant fire-breathing chicken that almost looks like it’s getting back at you for all those years of chicken-kicking.
Those chickens are finally getting their revenge in Fable.
Sony’s last State of Play showed our first glimpse of Project Windless, an open-world action RPG based on the Korean novel series The Bird That Drinks Tears. Also, you play as a buff, humanoid chicken in it.
Details are sparse on the game itself, which doesn’t have a release window yet, but you’ll play as a Rekon, which is part of a “nomadic warrior race of humanoid bird,” per the PlayStation Blog. Based on the gameplay footage in which this Rekon fights off a preposterous number of enemies, this guy is clucking mad, and he’s fighting for more than just getting to the other side.
Finally, there’s Browt, the grass starter Pokemon in Pokemon Winds and Waves, which comes out on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. According to the game’s official website, this “Bean Chick Pokemon” weighs 7.7 pounds and uses the leaves on its brow to photosynthesize. This Angry Bird-looking creature may look cute now, but fans are undoubtedly already speculating what Browt will evolve into and what additional types it’ll have.
There’s precedent for a chicken-themed starter before, with Torchic eventually evolving into the Fire/Fighting-type Combusken and Blaziken. Can we expect Browt’s final evolution to look like a green-tinted Rekon or Cockatrice?
These three join the poultry pantheon of Cuccos from The Legend of Zelda series and the Minecraft chickens (that are often jockeyed, let’s say). We have no clue why chickens are on the rise in modern gaming, but it’s safe to say that the industry is now observing an unofficial Year of the Rooster.
