Collecting creatures has never been so addictive and beautiful.
Down in the center of Brighton, where the city meets the sea, and resting in the mesh shade of a burnt-out hotel, there’s a traffic crossing where someone has fixed a set of plastic googly eyes on one of the green men. I don’t know how long these things last, but if you’re around in the next few days, you might still see it. I noticed it because I was out with my daughter and she always notices these things: a green man who stared at us as we waited to cross the street with the rest of the human crowd.
Noticing things is taking a while now. Have you noticed this? There are best-selling books that show you how to pay attention more effectively. On TikTok you’ll scroll and pause on videos of rain on city streets, seabeds stained with surface water rippling above, ephemeral shapes forming and unforming in sun-drenched clouds. Tagline: the art of noticing. Here you will find beauty and riches, here are the gifts that are only available if you have first trained yourself to see them.
And then there’s Flock, and Flock feels very much of a part with this kind of thing. It’s a game about wildlife and it’s a game about collecting things. But it’s also, serving as the foundation for all that other stuff, a game to watch. Her world is there for you to discover, but only when you are ready. Only when you are in sync, only when you are properly adjusted.
A bit of taxonomy ahead. Well, a bit of background anyway. Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. This is the team that made the almost indescribable snake control game Hohokum – “snake control game” is a really terrible description for a game as wandering, restless and experimental as this – and there’s a bit of the sly, propulsive movement here of Hohokum. as you send yourself bouncing through the skies and across the grass. This is the team that also made I Am Dead, an ensemble-based exploration of mortality inspired by a video of a banana in an MRI. In I Am Dead you discover the world and its story through its bits and pieces. You rummage through it all like it’s just one big junk shop. There’s something of that about Flock too.
More than anything, though, Flock is just Flock – and that’s more than enough. Set off from the top of a hill to explore a landscape of grass, rock, moss, concrete and wetlands. You are riding on the back of a cute red bird and you are hunting for examples of local wildlife. As you find more of these examples, the world expands and even more of these creatures become available. How do you hunt them? In fact, hunting is exactly the wrong way to look at it. You recognize them. You learn to see them. You teach yourself to notice them.
And this works in different ways. Upon arriving in a new area, a handful of creatures will simply move, flying through the sky, diving into concrete, burrowing through grass. Everything in Flock is soft-edged and gently comic – everything is at home in a world of googly-eyed green men – so these flying, gobbling, gnawing things will have candied rainbow stripes, Gonzo noses , swift little wings that hold them up. . Get to know each other and they begin to organize themselves into families: Gleebs, Winnows, my dear Thrips. But not all will be so easy to find.
Some will only be available at certain times of the day, and the day rolls wonderfully across the sky here, scattered in the seventies with glimpses of pink and purple blooms and golden light, while the night stains everything in a rich blue as a large pearly moon sits in the sky. Thrips, which light up as they buzz around, often only appear around trees after dark. Other creatures will look for breakfast before making their rounds. Others still will bathe only at noon.
But the time of day is still only a part of it. Other creatures need certain environments – trees, long grass, but also wetlands, a lucky hill. Some will hide in clumps of fallen leaves. Others will be disguised as stones. Some will have specific calls to listen for.
So from this simple point, there are already two ways to look at Flock. In one of them you walk around the bird and look for creatures in nature. But in the second, you switch to first-person focus mode, or stand in one position and zoom in on details. This is how you look for things that really don’t want to be found, that have discovered ingenious, sometimes complicated means of hiding.
There are aids in this search of yours. You’re compiling a list of every creature you spot, arranged into neat families, and each place missing from the list will have a little clue pointing you in its obscure direction. Certain creatures may like a certain part of the expanding biome. Some may require you to track down a male species first. Some have almost complete recipes for solving them, and some have only the thinnest, weakest clues of cryptic crosswords. Enough is enough though. These requirements, combined with an environment that just begs to be explored, are enough to see you through.
This all works, and feels so special, for a number of reasons. The first is that the movement is so beautiful. Flock handles your altitude for you, so you just pick a direction and a speed and go. The world glides past you, around you, while certain features of the landscape will whisk you away high into the sky. You are moving forward, but not only forward. There is a subtle sense of curvature to your momentum, as if you were a stylus in the groove of a spinning disc. It’s nice to set off and see where you end up, going through woods, gathering moss, bumping against Fauvist trees and soft, uneven hills and hollows, coming across strange, sculpted pieces of old broken concrete that it hints at an artistic past that can never be recovered.
And then there’s the creature design, which is by turns silly and magical. Here are treble keys and air quotes and carpet runners fluttering through hidden air thermals. It’s funny flights of fancy to which I say: have you seen any real birds lately? The clumsy admiral on patrol who is the saucy seagull, the watercolor ghost we call Jay, decked out in rust and seaside blue and with a dot-printer for a voice? Flock’s Bestiary feels like a doodle, but it also feels like it was born out of studying nature, really looking at it, seeing the wild invention that keeps it all moving.
(And this is Flock, remember, so you don’t just spot these creatures. Over time and with the right whistles discovered, you can collect them too, by charming them with a simple mini-game and added to the ever-increasing crowd of animals that just follow you are beautiful things.)
And finally, Flock works so well because of a secret ingredient that goes hand-in-hand with warning, that lights it all up from within.
This ingredient? When the writer Helen Macdonald was young and out and about with their dad, and they were worried and maybe a little frustrated by all the expectations around them, something brilliant happened.
“And then my father looked at me,” they write in H is for Hawk, “half exasperated, half amused, and [he] explained something. He explained PATIENCE. He said that the most important thing of all to remember was this: that when you wanted to see something very badly, sometimes you had to stand still, stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it, and to be patient. .”
Flock does that. And he does this with great courage. Time is compressed in a video game: the passage of a short amount of time can make a big impact. Flock absolutely knows this, and yet it’s going to make you sit back and wait and watch—and it’s going to make that waiting and watching a lot longer than you might initially anticipate. And so the other day I spent literally fifteen minutes under a rose-leafed tree, waiting for something that I just knew was coming, and when it did, I actually screamed with happiness. I spent a whole night in the wetlands—a human night, not a herd night—looking at the promising rocks and not seeing much else. Looking back, I wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t like when I was a kid and I’d lost a little Lego piece and had to walk back and forth, plowing the carpet with my eyes as a hot pain settled into my brain. It was nice to wait at Flock. It was beautiful for the patient. I was paying attention. I was ready for bright things to happen. I was where I was supposed to be.
That’s my flock, anyway, and maybe yours will be different. There’s a whole quest line for tracking down stolen items, which involves sending sheep to graze on certain hills. It’s that charming component of the creature, and it’s only going to become a fixture for some players. And then there’s the fact that Flock is designed to be played online with friends, friends flying and gliding over the rounded earth, noticing things together.
But for me it’s a solo thing. Give me the moonlight, give me my dear Thrips in the gad about my head. It gives me that moment where I’ve studied the creature catalog, the map, and the landscape so intently that when a trumpet-nosed sausage creature appears in the distance and I realize I’ve never seen it before, I immediately think: Bewls. This is a Bewl. A new one. I’ve been waiting for it and now it’s actually here.
The review code for Flock was provided by Annapurna Interactive.