My all-time favorite mode of travel in games is flying, so I was ready (in mid-air) to really enjoy flying through 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 at Peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding around strange forests and rolling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful track. tail Big Journey vibes, but more quirky and colorful.
Guided by your aunt Jane, a local zoologist, you learn to charm the local fauna, which are a flock of birds of various shapes such as large humpback whales, small whales or medium-sized potato whales with strange colors and plumage, adapted to different areas of the map. They are arranged in separate families, like doing a bit of proper taxonomy, and each family is fascinated by playing with a different whistling tone to them. Herein lies the inciting incident, for early in the game a group of Burgling Bewls (a family of long-nosed, stripey bastards) steal all of Jane’s whistles and hide them in little bowl-shaped meadows.
Go, then, to find these whistles, enchant the animals in your herd and find some strange new creatures with special abilities. It’s a very holistic feeling game. To catch Burgling Bewls you need to herd your potato-shaped sheep (which you collect more of as you explore) in the meadows to reveal the Bewl’s secret hole. In them you can find a new whistle for a new set of creatures, but you can also find a charm that allows you to increase the size of your flock – mine is almost 30 – or a fur pattern pack, with which you can use the fur off your weird legless sheep and get some new chicks. That’s about the limit of the collections, though Jane’s students are waiting in every area to provide challenges. And the animals themselves are collections, in a way.
It is not a mentally taxing process. Whenever you find traces of a new, so far unclassified creature, you scan some clues and go on a short chase. Rustic (flatleaf family) leaves a trail of shimmering cosmic oil and scales and can disappear. So you follow the sounds, track them and charm them with the sounds of your rustic whistle. Voila! A cute new member of your flock. The exact characteristics of hiding and stalking may vary—a giant crystal-encrusted Skyfish must be charmed out of its cave by having five different crystal Sprugs in your flock, after which it hides in other caves and bellows—but it always follows the noises and flashes of color in the air. Playing this in one go for a review highlighted that the process was a bit repetitive.
For me the fun was more in the exploration. The Shiny Pokemon equivalents you collect, once you get them in your crew, will cause a drop in the thick fog that otherwise covers the land like a moving sea. Each time it falls, a new area is revealed, with a new herd of strange animals whistling to observe. Some just drift lazily through the air, as easy to pick as an apple from a tree. Others are hidden, or have tricks up their sleeves. In a sunny pine forest there are flat-faced blue owl things to chase until they get tired, and strange people with giant eyes that hide in tree trunks and wink at you. There are yellow-brown rustics in the pastures that hide if you get too close, get upset and run away if you don’t charm them quickly. Another species of rustic sleep wrapped in some kind of water plant; a jungle-dwelling Green Pepper uses a similar tactic by spinning round grapes; a small Sprug is camouflaged against the bright paintings that cover some of the concrete structures around the site.
You should use curiosity while playing Flock. Each creature makes a different noise, and if you’re flying through some trees and hear something but don’t see it, you have to stop and jump into your first-person scanner view to see if you can spot it by hid. There is a species of Sprug that pretends to be fruit that I have yet to find and am desperate for, and a whole species of nearly invisible flatfish things, of which I have only discovered a muddy variety. But I’m also curious about the earth. The animals and scenery follow the happy, round-faced style characteristic of the work of “art boy” Richard Hogg, and it’s soothing to fly around looking at mushroom forests of fascinating strangeness, wondering: who built this path? through the woods? These half-fallen ruins? How long have those paintings been there for Sprug to develop along with them?
And so you fly around, speeding up, slowing down, looking. You develop a taste for the herd behind you. My favorites became the whale-like Drupes, and a particular Gleeb that looks like it should be a Drupe but isn’t, as well as any sort of creature that could be described as ‘trying its best’, e.g. Skyfish. But you might like the glowing thrips that come out at night or the heart-shaped cosmetics. Going back to the Journey comparison, you can play Flock in multiplayer with up to three other people, calling each other across the landscape and showing off your little teams – except the servers weren’t for me. I can see it being a fun and collaborative collaboration, in theory.
In practice, my flight was completely solo, but I enjoyed it. It’s a little repetitive, there are a few small glitches where the game can forget you’ve already beaten that story and make you do it again, but Flock is full of good humor, freedom and playfulness. It’s something you wouldn’t play with all the time, but you can check after a long day. Tomorrow, you think, I should have a job emailing people. But tonight, I will find that elusive Sprug pretending to be a fruit.
This review is based on a build review of the game provided by the developer.