Collecting creatures has never been so thoughtful and beautiful.
Down in the center of Brighton, where the city meets the sea, resting under the latticed shadow of a burnt-out hotel, is a traffic junction where someone has stuck a set of plastic googlies on one of the green men. I don’t know how long these things last, but if you’re around in the next few days, you’re probably still seeing it. I noticed this because I was out with my daughter and she always notices these things: the green man staring at us while we waited to cross the road with the rest of the human crowd.
Noticing things is having a moment now. Did you notice that? There are best-selling books that tell you how to pay attention more effectively. On TikTok, you’ll scroll and pause on videos of rain on city streets, seabeds stained by ripples of surface water overhead, ephemeral shapes forming and unforming in sun-fringed clouds. Slogan: the art of noticing. Here you will find beauty and riches, here are gifts that are only available when you have learned to see them.
And then there’s Flock, and Flock feels like a piece with things like that. It’s a wild nature game and it’s a collecting game. But it’s also a game of mindfulness that serves as the foundation for all that other stuff. His world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you are ready. Only when you’re in sync, only when you’re in the right tune.
A bit of taxonomy ahead. Well, a little genealogy anyway. Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. This is the team that created the almost indescribable snake control game Hohokum – “snake control game” is a really terrible description for a game as wandering, restless and experimental as this – and there’s a bit of Hohokum’s zigzagging, propulsive movement. as you slide across the sky and across the grass. This is the team that also created I Am Dead, an ensemble exploration of mortality inspired by the banana MRI video. In VI Am Dead you discover the world and its story through its pieces. You’re shuffling it all like it’s just one big junk shop. Flock has some of that too.
More than anything else though, Flock is just Flock – and that’s more than enough. You set out from the top of the hill to explore a landscape of grass, rock, moss, concrete and wetlands. You ride on the back of a red friend and hunt for examples of the local wildlife. As you find more of these examples, the world expands and more and more of these creatures become available. How do you hunt them? In fact, hunting is the wrong way to look at it. Do you see them. You learn to see them. You learn to perceive them.
And it works in different ways. Upon arriving in a new area, a handful of creatures will just hang around, flying around the sky, basking on concrete and sniffing grass. Everything about Flock is subtle and subtly comical – everything is at home in the world of green, sly-eyed little men – so these flying, basking, goofy things will have candied rainbow stripes, derby stick Gonzo noses, nimble little wings to keep them aloft. More appear and begin to fall into families: Gleebs, Winnows, my beloved Thrips. But not all of them will be so easy to find.
Some will only be available at certain times of the day, and here the day shifts beautifully across the sky, delivered in seventies shots of pink, purple and gold light, while the night turns everything deep blue as a huge pearly moon sits in the sky. Those thrips that light up as they buzz around often appear around trees after dark. The other creatures will need the morning before they set out. The others will bask only at noon.
But the time of day is still only part of it. Other creatures need certain environments – trees, long grass, but also wetlands, a certain hill of happiness. Some hide in clumps of fallen leaves. Others disguise themselves as rocks. Some will have specific calls to listen to.
So from this simple point there are already two ways to look at Flock. In one of them, you ride a bird and look for creatures outside. But in the second, you switch to a first-person focus mode or sit on a perch and zoom in on the details. This is how you look for things that don’t really want to be found, that have discovered ingenious, sometimes convoluted means of hiding.
There are tools for this search of yours. You collect a list of every creature you see, sorted into neat families, and each missing niche on the list will have a little clue to point you in its obscure direction. Certain creatures may like a certain part of the expanding biome. Some may require you to track down a male species first. Some have pretty much full-fledged recipes to reveal them, and some have only the slyest and thinnest of cryptic crossword clues. But that’s enough. These challenges, combined with an environment that just calls out to be explored, are enough to get you through.
It all works, and it’s so unique, for several reasons. The first is that the movement is so beautiful. Flock handles your altitude for you, so you just pick your direction and speed and off you go. The world slips past you, around you, while certain features of the landscape launch you high into the sky. You go forward, but never only forward. There’s a subtle curvature to your momentum, as if you were a stylus in the groove of a turntable. It’s lovely to set out and see where you end up, weaving through woods, taking in moss, hurtling against Fauvist trees and soft, level hills and Ravilious valleys, bumping into strange, sculpted pieces of old broken concrete that hint at a refined past that can never be restored.
And then there’s the creature design, which is goofy and magical. Here are treble clefs and air citations and carpet treads rippling through the hidden thermals of the air. These are ridiculous flights of fancy I call: have you seen real birds lately? The tottering admiral on patrol who is an overfed seagull, the watercolor ghost we call Jay, decked out in rust and sea blue and with a dot matrix printer for a voice? The Flock Bestiary feels like a doodle, but it also feels like it was born out of a study of nature, a real look at it, a look at the wild invention that keeps it all moving.
(And this is the Flock, remember not to just spot these creatures. You can also collect them over time and with the right whistles, enchant them with a simple mini-game, and add them to the ever-growing mob of animals that just chase you, it’s a beautiful thing.)
Finally, the secret ingredient that makes Flock work so well is mindfulness, which illuminates it all from within.
This ingredient? When writer Helen Macdonald was young and birdwatching with their dad, and they were restless and perhaps a little frustrated with the wait, something wonderful happened.
“And then Dad looked at me,” H is for Hawk, “half exasperated, half amused, and [he] he explained something. He explained patience. He said the most important thing to remember was this: that when you wanted to see something very badly, sometimes you had to stay calm, stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it, and be patient. .”
Flock does it. And he does it with great courage. Time is compressed in a video game: a little time can take a big toll. Flock totally knows this, and yet they’ll keep pushing you to sit back and wait and watch – and make that wait and watch much longer than you’d initially expect. So the next day I literally spent fifteen minutes under a rose leafed tree waiting for something I knew would pop up and when it did I squealed with happiness. I spent the whole night in the wetlands – a human, non-flock night – looking at the promising rocks and seeing nothing else. Looking back, I wasn’t frustrated. It wasn’t like when I was a kid and lost a little piece of Lego and had to walk back and forth, plowing the carpet with my eyes as a hot pain settled into my brain. It was lovely to wait in Flock. It was nice and patient. I was paying attention. I was ready for bright things to happen. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Anyway, this is my Flock and maybe yours will be different. There are a number of quests about tracking down stolen items that involve sending out sheep to eat the grass on certain hills. There’s the charming creature component, which alone will be appealing to some players. And then there’s the fact that Flock is made to be played online with friends, friends who drift and glide across a round earth and notice things together.
But for me it’s a solo thing. Give me moonlight, give me my beloved Thrips to be above my head. Give me that moment when I’ve been studying a creature catalog, map, and landscape so intently that when a smoky, pipe-nosed creature appears in the distance and I realize I’ve never seen one before, I immediately think: Bewls. This is Bewl. New. I’ve been waiting for it and now it’s actually here.
Review code for Flock provided by Annapurna Interactive.