Herdling is as much of an experience as it is a game. There is gameplay as you gather and herd goat-like animals through the world, but it’s there to further your emotional travels with these creatures. It’s a game for dreamers, for the innocent, for those who delighted in floating around in Thatgamecompany’s Journey.
The game opens with the unnamed and silent protagonist waking up in an underpass and walking into a decaying urban sprawl. Here they meet their first Calicorn, shaggy horned creatures that come in different shapes and sizes, from stately elders who sit on their hindquarters and tower above our hero, to small bundles of fluff and feathers who gamble about like excited rabbits. A few button presses later, and you can start herding your tame Calicorn through the city and out to pastures new.
As you progress through the various biomes, you can pick up more Calicorns and soon have a fairly large herd to move around, an act that does become a little frustrating due to the control mechanism. You can direct the Calicorns only if you are behind one of them, and then use the joystick to move a flowery cursor to indicate where the Calicorns should move next. However, as you have to do this when the Calicorns are moving, sometimes at speed, and the cursor can dance across the world as the distance and angle between yourself and the Calicorns constantly changes. It feels like a control system designed for a mouse that had to be deployed into a console game, which uses less precise controllers.
The Calicorns can be powered up by flowers; Wade through a patch of blue blooms and you gain a speed boost to use when you wish, while red will extend the boost. These are used when you need to climb up slippery rock slopes or crash through tough bushes, but are also liberally spread throughout meadows. Here you can gallop across wide areas, the wind racing, the music soaring as you do, and it’s moment of pure delight.
There are some very simple puzzles, most of which involve finding a path to a stranded Calicorn or pushing a switch or lever, and you can lose a Calicron in a couple of sections. The first way for one to die is if it wanders off a crumbling cliff and plummets like a lemming, but the second comes from the skies. The chapters near the end of the game include monstrous bird creatures which sit on ledges and watch your fluffy friends as you wander through the land. The birds are activated by trampling into specific rock formations, and areas of the game are littered with these, meaning you have to carefully manage the herd and use precise instructions, something that becomes increasingly difficult as your herd grows.
Each chapter ends with a campfire where you can bond more with your horned friends. You can assign each one a name of your choice, pet them, groom them, and later play fetch. While these activities are pleasant, they are fairly limited, and once you have performed each action a couple of times, there appears to be no apparent incentive to do them again. You herd can also get injured, their coats becoming red with blood but this does not seem to affect them in any other way. Video game logic applies here and feeding the beasts fruit that can be harvested from convenient bushes quickly heals all injuries, your Calicorn will be happy bundle of fluff within seconds. You can also pick up additional adornments for the Calicorns and while it is a nice idea, they do end up looking like badly dressed Christmas trees.
Like Journey there is no dialogue and the story is told through imagery, starting with a billboard in the city that shows Calicorns in their native home. There are also murals to discover and images in dreams that hint at a larger story, but how you interpret these is up to you. Music from composer Joel Schoch plays a huge part, with calming flutes in the quieter moments and rambunctious trills when racing through fields, and when the music does quieten there are emotive sounds of winds and forests to immerse you, it is a great game to play using headphones.
Your enjoyment of Herdling will depend entirely if you can connect with the Calicorns, do you care about their future? For the first three of the roughly four hours of game time, I did. I rescued them from wrecked trains, fed them, named them after my pets and happily ran through forests watching the smaller Calicorn tails bobbing up and down like bunnies. However, as the herd grew and become more unwieldly I started to lose my patience with the control mechanic and started consciously sacrificing Calicorns just so I could plough through another Bird monster area, While it might not have been quite so much like real life herding, a simpler mechanic, such as direct line from the protagonist to the spot you want the herd to move to, without having to be behind the Calicorns, would have removed all my frustrations from the game and all the Calicrons would be alive. In other words I am blaming the developers for the casual murder of the fluffballs, shame on them.
