My favorite way to travel in games is by flying, so I was ready (in the air) to really enjoy gliding around the world of Flock. It’s a gentle exploration game from the creators of Wimot’s Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, an RPS in Peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding through strange forests and rolling meadows on the back of a giant bird with a stunning tail. The vibe of Big Journey, but more whimsical and colorful.
Under the care of Aunt Jane, the local zoologist, you learn to charm the local fauna, which consists of a group of differently shaped birds, such as huge radishes, diminutive whales, or medium-sized potato whales with odd colors and plumage, adapted to different areas of the map. They are sorted into separate families, as if we were doing a bit of proper taxonomy, and each family is charmed by playing a different whistling note on them. Herein lies the inciting incident, because early in the game a group of Burgling Bewls (a family of long-nosed sweet potatoes; a sub-category of the striped bastards) steal all of Jane’s whistles and hide them in diminutive bowl-shaped meadows.
So set out to find those whistles, charm the animals in your flock, and find strange recent creatures with special abilities. This is a game with a very holistic feel. To catch Burgling Bewls, you’ll need to herd your potato-shaped sheep (which you collect more of as you explore) into meadows to uncover the Bewls’ hideout. In these, you might find a recent whistle for a recent group of creatures, but you might also find a charm that lets you enhance the size of your flock – mine is almost 30 – or a wool pattern pack, which lets you apply the wool from your strange legless sheep and earn some nippy recent clothes. That’s about the limit of collectibles, although Jane’s students are waiting in every area to offer challenges. And the animals themselves are, in a way, collectibles.
It’s not a mentally taxing process. Each time you find a recent, previously unclassified creature, you scan a few clues and go on a tiny chase. Rustic (a family of flat-leafed creatures) leaves a trail of shimmering space oil and scales and can disappear. So you follow the sounds, track it down, and charm it with your rustic whistles. Voila! A nippy recent member of your flock. The exact features of the hide and chase can vary—the giant crystal-covered Skyfish must be charmed out of a cave, with five different Crystal Sprugs in your flock, then hide in different caves and roar—but it always follows the sounds and the colorful shimmers in the air. Playing it all at once for review purposes highlighted the somewhat repetitive nature of the process.
For me, the fun was more about exploration. The Shiny Pokémon counterparts you collect once you add them to your crew will trigger a droplet in the stout fog that otherwise covers the land like a raging sea. Each time it drops, a recent area is revealed, with a recent herd of strange, whistling animals to observe. Some just lazily paddle through the air, as straightforward to pick as an apple from a tree. Others are hidden or have tricks up their sleeves. In the bright pine forest, there are blue, flat-faced owls that you have to chase until they tire out, and big-eyed weirdos that hide in tree trunks and wink at you. In the grasslands, there are brown and yellow Rustics that hide if you get too close, and get bored and run away if you don’t charm them quickly. Another species of Rustic sleeps curled up in a ball like a water plant; the green Piper that lives in the jungle uses a similar tactic, twining around vines; the Tiny Sprug stands out against the brightly colored murals that cover some of the concrete structures in the area.
You have to apply your curiosity when playing Flock. Every 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 switch to the first-person scanner view to see if you can spot it hidden. There’s a species of Sprug that pretends to be a fruit I still haven’t found and am desperate to find, and a whole species of nearly imperceptible flatfish, 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 “artist” Richard Hogg, and it’s soothing to fly around and see forests of mushrooms of mesmerizing strangeness, wondering: who built this path through the forest? These half-collapsed ruins? How long have these paintings been there for Sprug to evolve with them?
And so you fly around, speeding up, slowing down, observing. Developing flavors for the flock 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 all sorts of creatures that could be described as “trying its best,” like the cruelly but aptly named Gormless Skyfish. But you might like the glowing Thrips that come out at night, or the heart-shaped Cosmets. Returning 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 squads—except that the servers weren’t for me. I can imagine it being a fun and cooperative co-op game, in theory.
In practice, my flight was completely solitary, but I enjoyed it. It’s a bit repetitive, there are minor snags where the game can forget you’ve already hit that plot point and tell you to do it again, but Flock is full of humor, freedom, and fun. It’s something you don’t play all the time, but you can still reach out to after a long day. Tomorrow, you think, I have to have a job where I’ll send people emails. But tonight, I’ll be hunting down that elusive Sprug that’s masquerading as fruit.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
