My favorite method of travel in games is flying, so I was already primed (in the air) to really enjoy gliding around the world of Flock. It’s a gentle exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot’s Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, RPS in peace) in which you never touch the ground, but instead soar through strange forests and rolling meadows on a giant bird with a beautiful tail. Big Journey vibes, only more whimsical and colorful.
Under the guidance of your aunt Jane, a local zoologist, you learn to charm the local fauna, a group of sorts of birds with different shapes, such as large radishes, small whales or medium-sized potato whales with strange colours and plumage, adapted to different areas of the map. They are sorted into separate families, as if you were doing a bit of good taxonomy, and each family is charmed by playing a different whistle to them. Here lies the inciting incident, for at the start of the game a group of Burgling Bewls (a relative of the long-nosed yam; subcategory striped bastards) steal all of Jane’s whistles and hide them in small bowl-shaped meadows.
Then set out to find these whistles, charm animals into your herd, and find some strange new creatures with special abilities. It’s a very holistic game. To catch the Burgling Bewls, you’ll need to let your potato-shaped sheep (which you’ll collect more of as you go) graze in the meadows to discover the Bewl’s lair. Inside you might find a new whistle for a new group of creatures, but you might also find a charm that lets you increase your herd—mine is nearly 30—or a wool pattern pack, which lets you use the wool from your strange legless sheep and get some cool new clothes. That’s about the limit of the collectibles, though Jane’s students are waiting in each area to provide challenges. And the animals themselves are collectibles in a way.
It’s not a mentally taxing process. Each time you find traces of a new, as-yet-unclassified creature, you scan a few clues and go on a short chase. The Rustic (a family of flat-leaf creatures) leaves behind trails of sparkling cosmic oil and scales, and can disappear. So you follow the sounds, track him down, and charm him with your Rustic whistles. Voila! A cool new member of your flock. The exact characteristics of the hiding and chasing can change—a giant crystal-covered Skyfish needs to be charmed out of his cave by having five different crystal Sprugs in your flock, after which he hides in other caves and roars—but he always follows sounds and colored twinkles in the air. Playing through it in one sitting for a review highlighted the process as a bit repetitive.
For me, the fun was more in the exploration. The Shiny Pokémon equivalents you collect, once you have them in your party, will trigger a drop in the thick fog that otherwise covers the land like a rolling sea. Each time it falls, a new area is revealed, with a new group of strange, whistling creatures to observe. Some just paddle lazily through the air, as easy to collect as an apple from a tree. Others are hidden, or have tricks up their sleeves. In a sunny pine forest are blue, flat-faced owls that must be chased until they tire, and giant-eyed weirdos that hide in tree stumps and blink at you. In the grasslands are brown-and-yellow Rustics that hide if you get too close, and get bored and run away if you don’t charm them quickly. Another kind of Rustic sleeps curled up in some kind of water plant; a green Piper that lives in the jungle uses a similar tactic, wrapping itself around vines; a small Sprug is camouflaged against the bright paintings that cover some of the concrete structures surrounding the site.
You have to use your curiosity when playing Flock. Each creature makes a different sound, and if you’re flying through some trees and hear something but don’t see it, you have to stop and go into your first-person scanner view to see if you can spot it hiding. There’s a species of Sprug that pretends to be fruit that I still haven’t found, and I desperately want to, and a whole species of nearly invisible flatfish-like things of which I’ve only ever found one muddy variety. But I’m also curious about the land. The animals and landscape follow the cheerful, round-faced style recognizable in the work of “artist” Richard Hogg, and it’s soothing to fly around and look at mushroom forests of enchanting strangeness, wondering: who built this path through the forest? These half-fallen ruins? How long have those paintings been there, that the Sprug has developed alongside them?
And so you fly around, speeding up, slowing down, watching. You develop a taste for the herd behind you. My favourites became the whale-like Drupes, and a certain Gleeb that looks like it should be a Drupe but isn’t, and any sort of creature that could be described as ‘trying hard’, say the cruelly but aptly named Gormless Skyfish. But you might enjoy the glowing Thrips that come out at night, or the heart-shaped Cosmets. Returning to the Journey comparison, you can play Flock in multiplayer with up to three other people, calling each other out across the landscape and showing off your own little teams – except the servers didn’t work for me. I can imagine it being fun and co-op, in theory.
In practice, my flight was completely solo, but I enjoyed it. It’s a bit repetitive, there are some minor glitches that make the game forget you’ve already taken that storyline and make you do it again, but Flock is full of good humor, freedom, and playfulness. It’s the kind of game you wouldn’t play all the time, but you can look at it after a long day. Tomorrow, you think, I have to work a job where I email people. But tonight I’m going to hunt down that elusive Sprug who pretends to be a fruit.
This review is based on a review of the game, written by the developer.