Sometimes, all a game really needs is incredible vibes. That’s the case for Flock, the latest game by developers David Hogg and Hollow Ponds. Like Hogg’s 2014 game Hohokum, Flock is more about wide-open exploration than about chasing goals, and it makes for wonderfully chill experience — most of the time.
As the game opens, you’re visiting your aunt and uncle in the Uplands, a strange landscape mostly covered in a sea of clouds. Riding a giant bird (which you customize at the start of the game), you’re able to help Aunt Jane with her project of cataloging the Uplands’ most elusive animals, and gather Uncle Reg’s lost sheep.
Flock is a game about birdwatching, essentially. There’s more to it in that you’re working to catalog different species of bird-like animals and even charm them into joining you, but the basic feeling is similar. The creatures of Flock are often spooked by your presence or hard to find in the first place, meaning you need to practice the same kind of patience and careful observation you would if you were trying to catch sight of a rare bird in your own local wilderness.
At the outset, you only have a small area outside their base camp to explore, with the rest of the world covered in clouds. This introduction teaches you the game’s basic mechanic of identification. When you approach a species you haven’t seen before, a button prompt appears, launching you into observation mode. All you need to do here is watch this new critter, getting familiar with its movements, its appearance, or its call. Then, you can use Aunt Jane’s guide to figure out what the heck it is. Flock’s critters are divided into families, with several species in each. Every species gets a short description about its habitat, its looks, or some other tidbit you can gather from watching it, and your job is to match the description to the animal you’re looking at.
There’s no penalty for guessing incorrectly, but the feeling of assigning an animal the right family and species the first time around is still satisfying. Success doesn’t require any tricky mechanics or deep knowledge of game systems, it just means you took the time you needed to understand what sets this animal apart from others. That no-fail philosophy makes Flock a great chill-out game, summoning a lot of the same joy I got from Endless Ocean Luminous earlier this year (even if no one else seemed to). Instead of the pressure to succeed, you’re driven forward in Flock by the fact that identifying enough species leads to opening more of the map, giving you the chance to see even more wondrous creatures and landscapes.
Part of what makes this low-key exploration captivating is that the world and the things that inhabit it are a visual delight. Your journey takes you to wetlands teeming with life, fields of swaying grass and flowers, and lush forests full of gargantuan mushrooms. Each environment is as gorgeous as the last, and each also means the chance to see new species. From the Basking Bewls you’ll find bellowing on rocks practically anywhere in the world, you’ll move to the vanishingly rare Mossy Pipers hiding among trees and camouflaged Crystal Sprugs twinkling lightly among natural crystal formations. Every animal also has its own call, filling the world with song and handily letting you know when there’s a creature you might not have seen yet hiding nearby.
Flight also plays into Flock’s excellent exploration. Your flight controls are maybe a bit too simple — you essentially just hold one button and steer — but the feeling of seamlessly pulling off aerial acrobatics and zipping across the world’s gorgeous landscapes never gets old. I found myself thinking often of Sable, another game that emphasizes freedom of exploration in a beautiful, stylized world.
Flock’s sparse story only lasts a few hours. It mostly relies on Aunt Jane urging you on to the next big objective to unlock more of the map, spiced up with challenges like charming a certain number of creatures given by her assistants. Charming a creature means first finding a whistle that its family responds to hidden in the environment, then playing a short minigame where you need to stay a certain distance away while calling out their song. It gets old pretty quickly, but it’s a speedy enough process that it doesn’t drag the experience down.
Things get a little less charming once you roll credits. By that point, you’ll probably still have a sizable hole left in your critter catalog and your goal is to both fill it and charm every single animal multiple times in order to be considered an expert. It feels both aimless and a bit too restrictive, since finding the game’s rarest animals multiple times can be a drag and there’s no easy way of knowing where to even start looking for some of them. Flock is best when it focuses on its sense of freedom, but when it becomes about the more concrete task of mastering each species, it loses a bit of its magic.
Still, until that point, Flock is just lovely. Along with its menagerie of fantastical birds, you also collect flying sheep. These sheep are what let you unlock whistles to charm animals by grazing in certain fields, but they can also uncover clothing catalogs and provide you with wool, which you trade in to another NPC at base camp for new clothes. Their effects are entirely cosmetic, but an outfit change once in a while is always fun — probably moreso when you’re playing with a friend in the online multiplayer mode I haven’t gotten a chance to check out yet.
Despite an oddly dull endgame, Flock feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s not asking for mechanical mastery or for you to sink weeks into an overlong campaign. It’s enough if you just show up for a few hours, zoom around on with your avian best friend, and take in the beauty of virtual nature.
