“Flock will bring out the inner birdwatcher in you, even if only for a few short hours.”
- Picturesque world
- Quirky creatures
- Charming identification puzzles
- Multiplayer is a welcome touch
- Flying feels a bit too simple
- Story ends abruptly
- Endgame is grind heavy
I’m sailing on the back of my trusty bird through a forest lined with giant mushrooms when I spot something peculiar. I see a sparkly orb with a neon glow floating in front of me. As I puzzle over it, my eagle eyes see another one close by. Soon I’m following a trail of them like a zoologist tracking a set of footprints through the mud. After gliding in circles for a while, they lead me to a wondrous sight: a rainbow-colored serpent gracefully floating through the air. I stop to study it and learn that the creature is very territorial and marks its domain with gaseous clouds.
I’d just spent the past few minutes chasing a trail of farts. And I couldn’t have been happier.
It’s that nature identification hook that makes Flock such a charmer. The new game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg, the team behind indie gems such as Wilmot’s Warehouse, takes the quiet joys of birdwatching and places them into a low stakes exploration game about identifying weird wildlife. Though its loose story gives way to a grind-driven endgame too soon, Flock is a pleasant expedition to a colorful world that might help you better appreciate your own.
Birds of paradise
When Flock begins, I find my character sitting on the back of a bird in an ocean of clouds. After sailing to a nearby island and meeting some locals, I’m quickly given a simple task: go identify some critters. That quick introduction sets the stage for a sleek, streamlined exploration game where my focus is almost solely on observing wildlife. I don’t even have to think about my movement too much. I only steer and boost my bird, who smoothly hovers above the ground, while its height automatically changes based on the terrain. That simplified movement mostly works, though I occasionally find myself wishing I had more control when I struggle to line up with a creature I want to study.
Creatures are a silly delight to discover.
My focus is more on observing the eccentric world, a picturesque landscape filled with soft flora and bright pastels. It’s the kind of mini open world that’s been popular in recent indies like Little Kitty, Big City; it’s small in size, but dense in biodiversity. It feels like a circular preservation enclosure built to foster the 61 animals that call it home. And each of those creatures is a silly delight to discover.
In Flock’s world, all animals are a mix between birds and fish. They all hover through the air, though some exhibit specific behaviors that I sometimes need to crack like a puzzle. Some creatures, all of which belong to one of 13 invented species, are easygoing enough. Cosmets are disc-shaped critters with multicolored fins that I can easily fly up to and study. Thrips, on the other hand, are essentially fireflies with long snouts, and I can easily find them glowing at night. Finding every single creature and figuring out how to catalog them is the main draw here, as it rewards careful observation. When I hastily fly up to seahorse-like Baffin, it quickly dips into a crack in the rock below to hide from me. I learn that I’ll need to approach more carefully and observe from a distance if I’m going to study it.
Once I do get close enough to observe, I need to properly identify it and log it in my field guide. That means correctly guessing what genus it belongs to and then figuring out the species by looking at a list of short descriptors for each known creature and matching it based on what I’ve observed. It’s a sweet little system that has me carefully watching each creature’s movements, patterning, and eccentric behaviors. It’s a low-stakes puzzle. Whenever I guess wrong, I’m just told the right answer and I classify it with no penalty. I find myself wishing I could test myself a bit more, but Flock isn’t out to punish players; it just wants to keep their curiosity piqued like a wide-eyed kid at a zoo.
As an amateur birdwatcher myself, Flock really captures something I love about patiently watching animals in their natural habitats. On a recent walk through a nearby cemetery, I caught a bird I’d never seen soaring over a pond. I carefully peeked at it through my binoculars and started taking mental notes. Black feathers. Orange accents on its wings. A quick search let me correctly identify it as a red-winged blackbird, leaving me satisfied with my ability to clock its defining features. I get the same smile on my face whenever I see a green piper wrapped around a tree and correctly guess its name.
Natural grind
While that core hook lets Flock fly high early on, it struggles to keep that momentum beyond its end credits roll. The early game has me following a clear set of objectives that move me through the world naturally. As I classify critters, I occasionally stumble into environmental secrets or chat with NPCs who give me quick missions. I can also find (flying) sheep scattered throughout the world that I can drop off in a meadow to clear some grass and reveal hidden rewards. Each time I clear a major story beat, the clouds lower a bit around the island and reveal more space for me to explore. It’s a smooth flow where I always feel like I have something to do, but am never overwhelmed.
That concise setup ends on an abrupt note, as a seemingly uneventful mission three hours in took me to an end-credit roll. Flock gets looser from there with some mixed results. The longer-term goal beyond classifying each creature is to become an expert on every genus. To do that, I need to befriend creatures several times to max out my knowledge of them. That’s accomplished through a minigame where I follow the animal at a certain distance and sing to it. Doing so adds it to my flock, which follows me around like a bundle of balloons at a carnival. It’s a precious visual, but the minigame never changes despite some species having very different behaviors from one another. It’s a tedious grind, which flies in the face of the discovery element that makes the first few hours so special.
A cosmetic dress-up system adds a bit more to do, but that can get repetitive too. If I leave my sheep at enough meadows, I can eventually shear their wool and use it to buy clothing pieces for my character. It’s a cute touch, though I just wind up rotating between the same handful of spots to farm wool. Daily quests from NPCs reward me with wool too, but those largely just ask me to capture a few critters in a short time limit.
Flock at least finds a way to make that experience more social with a welcome multiplayer option. Up to four friends can easily jump into the world together and catch critters, giving more incentive to unlock costumes and show off. Granted, this is a sleek game with only a handful of unlockables and a small batch of creatures to find. It’s a pleasant way to spend time with some buds, but I don’t know that there’s quite enough here to support that for very long without updates.
The first time I see a critter is always the most exciting.
It’s an area where Flock, and games with similar hooks like Endless Ocean: Luminous, can have trouble truly capturing the wonders of nature. Even when I go to the same cemetery I frequent, my wildlife experience is always different. One day I might see a family of geese raising some newborns. The next, I’ll come back to see a white crane patrolling the same area, or a mallard couple nuzzling in the grass. Nature is dynamic; even animals in the same species can have wildly different personalities. A video game is static by comparison. Animals in Flock do their one thing and appear in the same rough areas. The first time I see a critter is always the most exciting. Everything after that reminds me I’m interacting with a machine.
It’s hard to get around those limitations, but Flock largely rises to that challenge in a delightful manner. Whenever I picked it up, I was transported in a way so many games strive for but few can pull off as well as this. For a few delightful hours, I was a full on birdwatcher, befriending tiny Winnows and following fart clouds through the forest just to get one glimpse at a rare piper. That it was all over so quickly wasn’t a problem; it meant I had more time to appreciate my feathered friends living in my own backyard.
Flock was tested on PC and Steam Deck OLED.
