Herd Review – The Art of Observation

In the middle of Brighton, where the city meets the sea, under the tangled shadow of a burnt-out hotel, there is a traffic crossing where someone has glued a set of plastic eyes to a green man. I don’t know how long these things will last, but if you’re around in the next few days, you might still be able to see them. I noticed it because I was out with my daughter and she always notices these things: a green man staring at us as we waited to cross the road with the rest of the human crowd.

Noticing is having a moment right now. Have you noticed? There are popular books that tell you how to pay attention more effectively. On TikTok, you’ll scroll through videos of rain falling on city streets, seabeds stained by ripples, and fleeting shapes forming and fading in sunlit clouds. Motto: The art of noticing. Here you’ll find beauty and riches, gifts that are only available if you first teach yourself to see them.

Then there’s Flock, which is a game that’s very much like this genre. It’s a game about wildlife and collecting. But it’s also the foundation for all of that other stuff, and it’s a game about observation. Its world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you’re ready. Only when you’re in tune, only when you’re properly in tune.

This was the first game rating. Well, there was a bit of pedigree anyway. Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. This is the team that made the almost indescribable snake-controlling game Hohokum — “snake-controlling game” is a really terrible description for a wandering, twitchy, experimental game like this — and there’s a bit of the meandering, propulsive action of Hohokum here as you send yourself flying through the sky and across the grass. This is also the team that made I Am Dead , a multiplayer exploration game of death inspired by a video of a banana in an MRI machine. In I Am Dead , you discover the world and its story through its bits and pieces. You wander around it all as if it were just a big junkyard. There’s a bit of that in Flock , too.

But at its core, a “flock” is just a flock—and that’s more than enough. You’re setting off from a hilltop to explore a landscape of grass, rocks, moss, concrete, and wetlands. You’re riding on the back of a cute red bird, looking for specimens of local wildlife. As you find more of them, the world expands and more of these creatures become available. So how do you hunt them? Actually, hunting is the wrong way to look at it. You observe them. You learn to see them. You teach yourself to notice them.

This works in a variety of ways. When you arrive in a new area, you’ll find a group of creatures scurrying around in the sky, basking on the concrete, and sniffing the air through the grass. Everything in the “flock” is fluffy and kind of funny—it all looks like it’s in a world of green men with bulging eyes—so these flying creatures enjoying the warmth and sniffing the air will have rainbow stripes adorned with sugar, gonzo noses like derby canes, and active little wings that hold them in the air. If you spot more of them, they’ll start to organize themselves into families: glee bugs, aphids, and my beloved thrips. But not all of them are easy to find.

Some will only be available at certain times of the day, and daylight passes beautifully across the sky here, its pink, purple and gold flowers appearing like a 1970s snapshot, while nighttime paints everything a deep blue as a huge pearly moon sits high in the sky. These thrips, which glow as they fly, often only appear around the trees when darkness falls. Other creatures will need morning before they can make their rounds. Still others will only enjoy the warmth of the afternoon.

But the time of day still matters. Other creatures need specific habitats—trees, tall grass, wetlands, and certain lucky hills. Some hide in clumps of fallen leaves. Some disguise themselves as rocks. Some make specific sounds they listen for.

From that simple point, there are two ways to hunt in Flock. In one, you’re on the back of a bird and looking for creatures in the open. But in the second, you switch to first-person focus, or settle into a perch and focus on the details. This is how you hunt for things that don’t really want to be found, and that have found ingenious and sometimes complex ways to hide themselves.

There are prompts for this task at hand. You compile a list of all the creatures you see, arranged in neat families, and each missing location on the list will have a little clue pointing you in its mysterious direction. Some creatures may like a particular part of the expanding environment. Some may require you to track down a male species first. Some have nearly complete recipes to discover and some only have the most cunning of hidden crossword clues. But that’s enough. These prompts, combined with an environment that just invites you to explore, are enough to see you through to the end.

All of this works, and feels unique, for a number of reasons. The first is that the movement is so beautiful. Flock handles your height for you, so you just pick a direction and speed and go. The world slides around you, while certain features of the landscape push you skyward. You’re moving forward, but not just forward. There’s a subtle sense of arc in your momentum, as if you were a pen in the groove of a spinning record. It’s wonderful to just set off and see where you end up, snaking through the forests, picking at moss, speeding up the monstrous trees and soft, balanced hills and valleys of Ravilious, encountering strange blocks carved from ancient, broken concrete that hint at an artistic past that can never be reclaimed.

Then there’s the creature design, which is at once whimsical and magical. Here we see triplet keys and air quotes and zigzag carpets that flow through invisible thermal currents in the air. These are absurd flights of fancy, to which I say: Have you seen real birds lately? The clumsy admiral on patrol who is an overfed seagull, and the aquatic ghost we call the Raven, decked out in rust and navy blue with a dot matrix printer instead of a voice? Phlox’s menagerie looks like a scribble, but it also feels like it was born from studying nature, really looking at it, and seeing the wild invention that keeps it all moving.

(And this is a herd, remember, so don’t just discover these creatures. Over time, as you discover the right whistles, you can collect them too, dazzle them with a simple mini-game and add them to the growing horde of animals that follow you everywhere. It’s beautiful stuff.)

Finally, Flock works so well because of a secret ingredient that works in conjunction with observation, which illuminates everything from within.

This ingredient? When writer Helen Macdonald was a young girl and went birdwatching with her father, and they were nervous and maybe a little frustrated with all this waiting, something wonderful happened.

“Then my father looked at me,” they wrote in H is for Hawk, “half annoyed, half amused, [he] Explain something. He explained. patienceHe said the most important thing to remember is: When you want to see something badly, sometimes you have to be still, stay in the same place, remember how much you want to see it, and be patient.

Flock does this. And it does it with aplomb. Time is compressed in a video game: a little bit of time can exact a huge toll. Flock knows this, and yet it will force you to stay still, wait, and watch—and wait and watch longer than you might initially expect. That’s why I literally spent fifteen minutes under a pink-leafed tree the other day, waiting for something I knew would show up, and when it did, I screamed with joy. I spent a whole night in the wetlands—a human night, not a Flock night—looking at promising rocks and seeing nothing else. Looking back, I wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t like when I was a kid and lost a tiny piece of Lego and had to walk back and forth, plowing the carpet with my eyes while a hot pain settled in my brain. Waiting in Flock was great. It was great to be patient. I was alert. I was ready for bright things to happen. I was where I was supposed to be.

This is my flock anyway, and yours might be different. There’s a whole series of quests to track down stolen items, which involves sending sheep to eat grass on certain hills. There’s the element of creature magic, and that alone might be appealing to some players. Then there’s the fact that Flock is designed to be played online with friends, with friends swooping and sliding across the round terrain, noticing things together.

But for me, it’s an individual matter. Give me moonlight, give me my beloved thrips to examine over my head. Give me that moment when I study the catalog of creatures, the map, the landscape with such keen interest that when a huge creature with a trumpet-like nose appears in the distance and I realize I’ve never seen it before, I think at once: Beul. That’s Beul. A new one. I’ve been waiting for it, and now it’s here.

The review code for Flock was provided by Annapurna Interactive.