My favourite ever mode of travel in games is flying, so I was already poised (in mid-air) to really enjoy swooping around the world of Flock. It’s a gentle exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot’s Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, RPS in peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding around the strange forests and rippling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful trailing tail. Big Journey vibes, but more whimsical and colourful.
Guided by your aunt Jane, a local zoologist, you learn to charm the local fauna, who are a bunch of sort-of-birds variously shaped like large radishes, small whales, or medium potato-whales with strange colour and plumage, adapted to different areas of the map. They’re sorted into discrete families, like doing a bit of proper taxonomy, and each family is charmed by playing a different whistling tone at them. Here lies the inciting incident, for at the start of the game a group of Burgling Bewls (long-nosed yam family; subcategory stripey bastards) steals all of Jane’s whistles and hides them in little bowl-shaped meadows.
Off you go, then, to find these whistles, charm animals into your flock, and find some strange new creatures with special abilities. It’s a very holistic-feeling game. To catch the Burgling Bewls you must graze your potato-shaped sheep (which you collect more of as you explore) on the meadows to uncover the Bewl’s hidey hole. In those you might find a new whistle for a new group of creatures, but you might find a charm that allows you to increase your flock size – mine is at nearly 30 – or a wool pattern pack, with which you can use the wool from your weird legless sheep and get some cool new duds. That’s about the limit of the collectibles, although Jane’s students are waiting in each area to offer challenges. And the animals themselves are collectibles, in a way.
It’s not a mentally taxing process. Each time you find traces of a new, hitherto unclassified creature, you scan a few clues and go on a short chase. The Rustic (flat leaf family) leaves behind traces of twinkling cosmic oil and scales, and can disappear. So you follow the sounds, track it down, and charm it with your Rustic whistle sounds. Voila! A cool new member of your flock. The precise features of the hiding and chasing might change – a giant crystal-covered Skyfish must be charmed out of its cave by having five different crystal Sprugs in your flock, after which he hides in other caves and bellows – but it’s always following noises and coloured twinkles in the air. Playing this in one go for a review highlighted the process as being a bit repetitive.
For me the fun was more in the exploration. The Shiny Pokémon equivalents you collect will, once you get them in your crew, trigger a drop in the thick mist that otherwise covers the land like a rolling sea. Every time it drops, a new area is revealed, with a new clutch of odd, whistling animals to observe. Some just lazily paddle through the air, as easy to collect as an apple from a tree. Others are hidden, or have tricks up their sleeves. In a sunny pine forest are blue flat-faced owl things that must be chased until they’re tired, and giant-eyed weirdos that hide in tree stumps and blink up at you. In the grasslands 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 type of water plant; a green Piper that lives in the jungle employs a similar tactic winding round vines; a tiny Sprug is camouflaged against the bright paintings that cover some of the concrete structures around the place.
You have to employ curiosity while playing Flock. Each creature makes a different noise, and if you’re flying through some trees and hear something but don’t see it, you should stop and drop into your first-person scanner view to see if you can spot it hiding. There is a type of Sprug that pretends to be fruit that I still haven’t found, and am desperate to, and a whole species of near-invisible flatfish things of which I have only discovered one muddy varietal. But I’m curious about the land as well. The animals and landscape follow the jaunty, round-faced style recognisable in the work of “art guy” Richard Hogg, and it’s calming to fly around looking at mushroom forests of mesmerising strangeness, wondering: who built this path through the forest? These half-fallen ruins? How long have those paintings been there, for the Sprug to evolve alongside them?
And so you fly around, speeding up, slowing down, watching. You develop tastes for the flock behind you. My favourites became the whale-like Drupes, and one particular Gleeb that looks like it should be a Drupe but isn’t, as well as any sort of creature that might be described as ‘trying its best’ e.g. the cruelly but aptly named Gormless Skyfish. But you might like the glowing Thrips that come out at night, or the heart-shaped Cosmets. Looping back to the Journey comparison, you can play Flock in multiplayer with up to three other people, calling to each other across the landscape and showing off your own little teams – except the servers weren’t up for me. I can see it being fun and co-operative co-op, in theory.
In practise mine was an entirely solo flight, but I enjoyed it. It’s a little repetitive, there are some slight snags where the game might forget that you already hit that story beat and makes you do it again, but Flock is full of good-humour, freedom, and playfulness. It’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t play all the time, but could check in with after a long day. Tomorrow, you think, I must have a job where I email people. But tonight, I will hunt for that elusive Sprug that pretends to be a fruit.
This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the developer.
