My favorite way to travel in games is flying, so I was already prepared (in the air) to really enjoy drifting around the world of Flock. It’s a smooth exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot’s Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, an RPS at peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding through strange forests and rolling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful drag . tail. Big Journey vibes, but moodier and more colorful.
Under the guidance of your Aunt Jane, the local zoologist, you will learn to enchant the local fauna, which is a group of bird species of different shapes such as large radishes, small whales or medium-sized potato whales with strange color and plumage, adapted to different areas of the map. They are sorted into separate families, as if they were doing a bit of proper taxonomy, and each family is enchanted by a different whistling note being played on them. Herein lies the inciting incident, as early in the game a group of Burgling Bewls (a family of long-nosed yams; a subcategory of stripey bastards) steal all of Jane’s whistles and hide them in small bowl-shaped meadows.
So set out to find those whistles, enchant animals into your flock and find some strange new creatures with special powers. It is 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 Bewl’s hideout. In those you can find a new whistle for a new set of creatures, but you can find a spell that lets you increase the size of your flock – mine is almost 30 – or a wool pattern pack with which you can use the wool from your weird legless sheep and get some cool new ones scumbags. That’s about the limit of the collectibles, though Jane’s students are waiting in each area to offer challenges. And the animals themselves are collectibles in their own way.
It is not a mentally demanding process. Every time you find traces of a new, as yet unclassified creature, you scan a few clues and go on a short chase. Rustic (flat leaf family) leaves a trail of shimmering cosmic oil and scales behind and may disappear. So you can follow the sounds, follow them and enchant them with your rustic whistle sounds. Voila! A great new member of your flock. The exact features of the hiding and stalking can change – a giant crystal-encrusted Skyfish must be charmed out of its cave by having five different crystal Sprugs in its flock, before hiding in other caves and bellows – but it’s always followed by sounds and colorful sparkles in the air. Playing this in one go for review highlighted that the process is a bit repetitive.
For me, the fun was more in the exploration. The Shiny Pokémon equivalents you collect once you get them in your crew will launch a drop in the thick fog that otherwise covers the ground like a rolling sea. Each time it falls, a new area will appear with a new pack of strange, whistling animals to observe. Some just flap lazily through the air, easy to pick like an apple from a tree. Others are hidden or have tricks up their sleeve. In the sunny pine forest, there are flat blue owls to chase until they tire, and weirdos with giant eyes who hide in the stumps and wink at you. There are brownish-yellow Rustics in the grasslands that will 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 a kind of aquatic plant; the green Piper, which lives in the jungle, uses a similar tactic of winding round vines; a small Sprug is camouflaged against the bright paintings that cover some of the concrete structures around the site.
When playing Flock, you have to engage your curiosity. Each creature makes a different sound, and if you’re flying through the trees and hear something but can’t see it, you should stop and jump into the first-person scanner view to see if it’s hiding. There’s a species of Sprug masquerading as fruit that I still haven’t found and am desperate for, and a whole species of almost invisible flounder of which I’ve only discovered 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 “the artist” Richard Hogg, and it’s comforting to fly around, looking at the mushroom forests of fascinating strangeness and wondering: who built this path through the forest? These half fallen ruins? How long were the paintings there for Sprug to develop alongside them?
And so you fly around, speed up, slow down, look. You develop appetites for the herd behind you. My favorites have become the whale-like Drupes and one particular Gleeb that looks like it should be a Drupe but isn’t, as well as any kind of creature that could be described as ‘trying hard’ eg cruel but the aptly named Gormless Skyfish. But you might like the glowing Thrips that come out at night or the heart-shaped Cosmets. Going back to the Journey comparison, you can play Flock in multiplayer with up to three other people, calling around the landscape and showing off your own little squads – except the servers weren’t for me. In theory, I can see it being fun and co-op.
In practice it was a completely solo flight, but I enjoyed it. It’s a little repetitive, there are little hiccups where the game might forget you’ve already hit that story beat and force you to do it again, but Flock is full of good humor, freedom and playfulness. It’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t play all the time, but might log into after a long day. Tomorrow, you think, I have to have a job emailing people. But tonight I’ll be on the hunt for the elusive Sprug pretending to be fruit.
This review is based on a compilation of the game review provided by the developer.