I have a lot of friends who are birders, a hobby I get in that you wander around outside and look at animals, and a hobby I do not get in that it sounds a little bit like a combination of homework and an eye test. But I love when I ask a pal about some bird I saw and they come back with a ton of interesting facts that make me think more deeply about the world around me. Flock, a critter-identifying game that came out last week, hits some of those notes.
In Flock, you play as a newcomer to an island that’s home to a range of creatures, which you’ve come to help catalogue. You travel the landscape on a giant bird, swooping among the wetlands, forests, and stone structures looking for signs of life. When you spot a creature, you study it for a bit, then open your creature guide and choose its family before using provided clues to narrow down exactly what sort of critter it is. It might be easy to tell it’s a bewl because it looks like a little sausage, but is it a belted bewl or a collared bewl? As more areas open up, more creatures get added to your guide.
As per the title, you can also gather a flock of creatures of your own, by finding their missing calls via whistles hidden throughout the world. Using these whistles, you can charm creatures into a pack that trails around behind you. You’ll occasionally need to do this to find other creatures in your guide, but as far as I can tell, mostly they just look cool. (Flock has a multiplayer component where I imagine these followings look very impressive, but I have only played single-player.)
All this might just sound like checkboxes, but I found filling out the creature guide charming and compelling. Flock’s developers are behind one of my favorite indie games, Wilmot’s Warehouse, which is also about categorizing things; unlike the taxonomy you create for yourself in that game, Flock’s categories are about making sense of a world that already exists. You discover a robust ecosystem and learn creatures’ habitats and behaviors, see their variation across regions or times of day. It helps that the creatures are all delightfully designed and have their own distinctive calls. I most enjoyed swooping through an area, following the clues in my guide to look for some specific creature while being able to identify all the sounds around me.
Flock is very chill; it’s pretty gentle if you get a family or creature wrong, and it strikes a good balance of sometimes being tricky without turning into some kind of hidden object game. There are challenges you can complete for side characters, as well as the ability to change your character’s appearance via wool you shear from sheep you find and graze, but mostly I just enjoyed looking for weird little guys, being surprised when something I thought was a rock blinked back at me, or following some kind of floating whale on its journey across the landscape. It’s a lovely game to kick back with at the end of the day, exploring its colorful landscape and learning about its world.
