Herd Review – The Art of Noticing

In the centre of Brighton, where the city meets the sea, and under the wire mesh shade of a burnt-out hotel, there is a pedestrian crossing where someone has glued a pair of plastic googly eyes onto 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’ll probably still be able to see it. I noticed it because I was out with my daughter and she always notices things like this: a green man staring at us as we waited to cross the road with the rest of the human crowd.

Mindfulness is all the rage right now. Have you noticed? There are bestselling books that tell you how to pay attention. On TikTok, you’ll scroll past and pause on videos of rain on city streets, of ocean floors stained by the ripples of surface water overhead, of fleeting shapes forming and distorting in sun-rimmed clouds. Tagline: The art of noticing. You’ll find beauty and riches in it, gifts that are only available if you’ve first learned to see them.

And then there’s Flock, and Flock seems really in tune with that kind of thing. It’s a game about wildlife and it’s a game about collecting items. But it’s also, by serving as the foundation for everything else, a game about observation. Its world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you’re ready. Only when you’re in tune, only when you’re properly in tune.

A bit of taxonomy up front. Well, a bit of lineage anyway. Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. This is the team that made Hohokum, a nearly indescribable snake-control game—“snake-control game” is a truly terrible description for a game as nomadic, restless, and experimental as this one—and there’s a bit of Hohokum’s meandering, propulsive movement here as you send yourself hurtling through the sky and grass. This is also the team that made I Am Dead, a set-based exploration of mortality inspired by a video of a banana in an MRI. In I Am Dead, you experience the world and its history through its bits and pieces. You wander through it as if it were just a big thrift store. There’s something of that in Flock, too.

But more than anything, Flock is just Flock, and that’s more than enough. You set off from a hilltop and explore a landscape of grass, rocks, moss, concrete, and wetlands. You’re on the back of a friendly red bird, and you set out to find examples of the local wildlife. As you find more and more examples, the world expands and more and more of these creatures become available. How do you hunt them? Well, hunting is exactly the wrong way to look at it. You spot them. You learn to see them. You teach yourself to notice them.

And it works in different ways. Upon arrival in a new area, a handful of creatures will wander around, flying through the sky, lounging on the concrete, sniffing in the grass. Everything about Flock is sweet and gently comical—everything is at home in a world of beady green men—so these flying, lounging, sniffing creatures will have sugary rainbow stripes, Gonzo derby-cane noses, snappy little wings holding them aloft. Spot more of them, and they’ll start organizing themselves into families: Gleebs, Winnows, my beloved Thrips. But they won’t all be so easy to find.

Some will only be visible at certain times of day, and daytime passes beautifully across the sky here, delivered in 70s snapshots of pink, purple and gold flowers, while nighttime stains everything a rich blue as a huge pearly moon sits in the sky. These thrips, which light up as they buzz, often only appear around trees when it’s dark. Other creatures will need morning before they make their rounds. Still others only bask at noon.

But time of day is only part of the answer. Other creatures need certain environments: trees, tall grass, but also wetlands, a certain lucky hill. Some will hide in clumps of dead leaves. Others will disguise themselves as rocks. Some will have specific calls to listen for.

So from this simple vantage point, there are already two ways to look in Flock. In one, you ride around on the bird’s back and look for creatures in the open. But in the second, you switch to first-person focus mode, or sit on a perch 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 convoluted, ways to hide.

There are some helpers in this quest. You gather a list of all the creatures you spot, sorted into neat families, and each missing niche on the list will have a little clue pointing you in its vague direction. Some creatures might like a certain part of the expanding biome. Some might require you to hunt down a male species first. Some have fairly comprehensive recipes for discovering them, and others have only the most devious and subtle clues of cryptic crosswords. But it’s enough. These prompts, combined with an environment that calls out to you to be explored, are enough to guide you.

It all works and feels so singular for a number of reasons. The first is that the movement is so enjoyable. Flock manages your height for you, so you simply choose a direction and a speed and go. The world slides past you, around you, as certain features of the landscape propel you high into the sky. You move forward, but not just forward. There’s a subtle sense of curvature in your momentum, as if you’re a stylus in the groove of a spinning record. It’s enjoyable to set off and see where you end up, weaving through forests, picking up moss, hurtling against tawny trees and the gentle, balanced hills and hollows of Ravilious, encountering strange sculpted chunks of old broken concrete that hint at an artistic past that can never be recovered.

And then there’s the creature design, which is by turns wacky and magical. There are treble clefs and quotation marks and conveyor belts slithering in the hidden thermals of the air. These are ridiculous flights of fancy, to which I reply: have you seen any real birds lately? The bumbling admiral on patrol that is the supercharged seagull, the watercolor ghost we call the jay, carved in rust and seaside blue and with a dot-matrix printer for a voice? Flocks’ bestiary looks like a scribble, but it also feels like it’s born from the study of nature, from real observation of it, from discovering the wild invention that makes it all move.

(And this is Flock, remember, so you don’t just spot these creatures. Over time, and with the right whistles discovered, you can also collect them, charm them with a simple mini-game, and add them to the ever-growing crowd of animals that follow you around. It’s adorable.)

And finally, Flock works so well because of a secret ingredient that goes hand in hand with observation, which illuminates everything from the inside.

That ingredient? When the writer Helen Macdonald was young and went birdwatching with her father, and they were restless and perhaps a little frustrated by all the waiting, something brilliant happened.

“And then my father looked at me,” they write in H for Hawk, “half exasperated, half amused, and (he) explained something to me. He explained patience. He said the most important thing to remember was this: When you really wanted to see something, sometimes you had to stand still, stay in one place, remind yourself how much you wanted to see it, and be patient.

Flock does this. And he does it with great audacity. Time is compressed in a video game: a little bit of time passing can have huge consequences. Flock knows this perfectly well, and yet he will push you to stand still, wait, and watch—and he will prolong that waiting and watching far longer than you might have originally imagined. The other day, I literally spent fifteen minutes under a tree with pink leaves, waiting for something I knew would emerge, and when it did, I screamed with joy. I spent an entire night in the wetlands—a human night, not a Flock night—looking at promising rocks and not seeing much else. Looking back, I wasn’t frustrated. It wasn’t like when I was a kid and lost a small piece of Lego and had to pace back and forth, digging into the carpet with my eyes as a burning pain settled in my brain. It was nice to wait in Flock. It was nice to be patient. I was attentive. I was ready for brilliant things to happen. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

That’s my Flock, anyway, and yours might be different. There’s a whole questline about finding stolen objects, which involves sending sheep to graze on the grass of certain hills. There’s this element of creature charm, and that alone will become fascinating to some players. And then there’s the fact that Flock is meant to be played online with friends, friends who fly and glide across the rounded earth, noticing things together.

But for me, it’s a solitary affair. Give me the moonlight, give me my beloved thrips to gambol overhead. Give me that moment when I’ve studied the creature catalogue, the map and the landscape so intently that when a sausage-nosed creature appears in the distance and I realize I’ve never seen it before, I instantly think: Bewls. It’s a Bewl. A new one. I’ve been waiting for it, and now it’s really here.

The review code for Flock was provided by Annapurna Interactive.