Sometimes you don’t need violence, guns, or an apocalyptic threat to make a game interesting and engaging. Sometimes just getting in touch with nature, relaxing, and having small achievable goals is enough to get you through a day. Enter Flock from developer Hollow Ponds.
Flock is a simple game of gathering information, solving puzzles, and creating a firm stance about how important animals and the environment should be in everyone’s life. The game puts you in the shoes of a shepherd who rides a large bird, and who is sent out to go discover new species while looking for lost items. Not a tough sell in a chaotic gaming world.
So, sit back and relax, make sure you’re charming the hell out of animals, and let’s sheer this review.
Cuteness overload
The gameplay in Flock is more about seeing and finding than it is about learning and doing. Stay with me on this. The seeing and finding elements of gameplay are the focus of this game. You are sent out to scope new species of beautiful and noisy animals of varying kinds. Groups of them belong to different families and it’s your job to make sure you identify and log them all. Think of a cuter version of Pokémon Snap and you’re on the right track.
To identify them, you get near them, click the A button on the controller, and you’re given a series of questions by a scientist to identify attributes for the tracked-down animal. The hardest part of the identification process is putting them in specific families, mainly because the families look so alike in color and cuteness. If you get the family wrong, you’re not penalized, you’re just given some kind words of encouragement and the animal goes to the family it belongs in.
Now, once the family is established, the scientist asks questions about specific visual attributes of the animal. The descriptions you choose are not complicated. They were built for gamers of every age. Nothing is tricky and nothing is so difficult that you will kick yourself later for getting it wrong. The descriptions are about noses, fins, body type, and sometimes eyes (those are funny). Once the animal is given a family and a specific name they are called, you move on to the next animal. You keep searching for these creatures and are silently encouraged to go everywhere and see as much as possible.
For the completionist out there, you’re going to love this game, as it wants you to explore a large world and uncover everything you can. And don’t worry, you’ll be able to achieve your completionist goals. Flock makes life easy by not being more than it is, which is seeing and finding. It makes the entertainment simple.
Let the computer do the work
After you search and find animals, and occasionally solve puzzles, the game doesn’t want to ask too much from you, so the learning and doing part of the game is simplified. The learning part is about controls. And the controls could have been complicated if done wrong. Thankfully, they weren’t done wrong.
The game puts you on a bird to get around the large world but it doesn’t require you to use both sticks and become some Red Bull stunt person with your overgrown seagull. It would have been very easy to institute the right stick to move the bird up and down and every which way, with the left stick used to simply navigate them. But the devs at Hollow Ponds went a different route and chose not to drive the player bonkers.
The controls are simply speeding the bird up and down, identifying and dropping animals off, and controlling the direction of the bird. Controlling the game on a Y and Z axis has been given solely to the computer to deal with and makes the game quite pleasant and distraction-free. The game does a good job of navigating objects, hills, and getting our friendly shepherd where they need to go. It takes a good chunk of worry during gameplay out of the equation while helping the player focus on finding animals and exploring the land. It’s simple and easy, and it keeps the player focused on the purpose of the game. I wish more games did this.
Flocking ‘A’
Beyond controls, the game also simplifies animal interaction. As you find out at the beginning, you can charm animals. The charming part helps convince the animal that the shepherd is friendly and that they should join your flock. To successfully charm the animal, you must select them and then you’re given dual parentheses as a marker that must be brought together through a tune to be successful. Once charmed, the animal hangs out with you and coos the entire time. It’s incredibly adorable.
You can have a varying number of animals following you around. The animals serve their purpose in many ways, but you’ll enjoy them for their absolute overload of cute. It’s fun having companions accompanying you on a journey of discovery, and doubly so when they’re designed like this.
Included in the flocks, you can find sheep hiding in strange places and add them to your flocking crew. Once you add a sheep to your flock, you can use them to eat mounds of grass and uncover hidden animals who stole items from residents around them. The items can be musical and useful, or just simply be tools to expand your flock. This alone will keep you active in the air trying to find places for your sheep to graze while hoping for cool goodies to recover. Getting back to the sheep, it should be stressed considerably that they are cute as hell and can be sheered to create yarn and access other items for your shepherd. All of this is super simple and just fun to keep up with as the game rolls on.
Little bit of a bump in the hills
The only bump in this game’s hump is that sometimes the game can seem a bit light on content and purpose. While the game wants you to explore and discover, the land at times can feel too big and doesn’t seem to contain enough purpose to create motivation to keep going. I know that sounds bleak but sometimes you’ll just fly around endlessly until you run into something or trigger the game’s action. The simplicity of the game helps to forgive this problem a bit, as it doesn’t feel like an exhausting adventure that asks too much from you, but that lack of content at times can be felt.
Now, Flock doesn’t make any promises that it will be filled to the brim with quests and motivation to keep exploring but it should give some more substance to give the adventure purpose. Players always need pushing and reason to keep playing a game, and Flock can be short of that at times.
To help sprinkle in some excitement, the game does feature customization and several not-so-difficult quests/goals to complete. These sprinkles do keep the gameplay from teetering into boring when a break is needed from exploring but not quite enough to make up for the lack of content.
Anyway, this part of Flock isn’t overbearing and doesn’t feel like it gets in the way of the rest of the game, but it is there.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Flock from developer Hollow Ponds is a unique, relaxing, and fun adventure that doesn’t require too much effort to enjoy. The game is slanted towards discovery and environmental positivity through simplistic controls that allow the player to focus on finding and identifying animals while traversing a large landscape. The only bump in the road is the occasional feeling of a lack of content.
