Flock review
Noticing things is having a bit of a moment just now.
Have you noticed this?
There are best-selling books telling you how to pay attention more effectively.
Tagline: the art of noticing.
And then there’s Flock, and Flock feels very much of a piece with this sort of thing.
It’s a game about wildlife and it’s a game about collecting stuff.
But it’s also, serving as bedrock for all of that other stuff, a game about noticing.
Its world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you’re ready.
Only when you’re in sync, only when you’re properly attuned.
A bit of taxonomy up front.
Well, a bit of lineage anyway.
Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg.
In I Am Dead you discover the world and its story through its bits and pieces.
You rustle through it all like it’s just one big junk shop.
There’s something of this to Flock too.
More than anything, though, Flock is just Flock - and that’s more than enough.
As you find more of these examples, the world expands and yet more of these creatures become available.
How do you hunt them?
Actually, hunting is exactly the wrong way of looking at this.
You learn to see them.
You teach yourself to notice them.
And this works in various ways.
Spot more and they start to arrange themselves into families: Gleebs, Winnows, my beloved Thrips.
But not all of them will be so easy to find.
Other creatures will require the morning before they make their rounds.
Others still will only bask at noon.
But the time of day is still only part of it.
Other creatures need certain environments - trees, long grass, but also wetlands, a certain lucky hill.
Some will hide in clumps of fallen leaves.
Others will disguise themselves as rocks.
Some will have specific calls to listen for.
So from this simple point there are already two ways of looking in Flock.
In one of them you ride around on the bird and you look for creatures out in the open.
There are aids on this quest of yours.
Some creatures might like a certain part of the expanding biome.
Some might require you to track down a male species first.
It’s enough, though.
This all works, and feels so singular, for a handful of reasons.
The first is that movement is so lovely.
Flock handles your height for you, so you just pick a direction and a speed and set off.
You’re moving forward but never only forward.
And then there’s the creature design, which is goofy and magical by turn.
Here are treble clefs and air quotes and carpet runners rippling through the hidden thermals of the air.
They’re ridiculous flights of fancy, to which I say: have you seen actual birds recently?
(And this is Flock, remember, so you don’t just spot these creatures.
It’s lovely stuff.)
And it does this with great daring.
Time is compressed in a video game: a little time passing can exert a great toll.
Looking back, I wasn’t frustrated.
It was lovely to wait in Flock.
It was lovely to patient.
I was paying attention.
I was ready for bright things to happen.
I was right where I was meant to be.
This is my Flock, anyway, and maybe yours will be different.
There’s that creature charming component, and that alone for some players will become transfixing.
But for me it’s a solo affair.
Give me the moonlight, give me my beloved Thrips to gad about overhead.
That’s a Bewl.
I’ve waited for it, and now it’s actually here.
Review code for Flock was provided byAnnapurna Interactive.
