Flock Review – A Charming Flight

Flock joins Annapurna’s growing catalog of “personal, emotional, and original” games, conjuring similar emotions as The Outer Wilds and even Stray. With Flock, Hollow Ponds and Annapurna have crafted a meditative explorative experience punctuated by impressionistic visuals and plenty of charm. As the title implies, you document and charm various creatures into following you. Flock doesn’t boast rich worldbuilding and a deep narrative, but there’s still an overarching goal, namely to fill Aunt Jane’s Creature Guide and gather whistles used to collect creatures. It’s a game all about exploring and documenting wildlife at your own pace; it’s about the journey, not the destination.

Flock’s gameplay loop is simple, yet satisfying. You’re given a bird to fly about on as you explore an ever-expanding open environment for new creatures. The first order of business is documenting a creature. This is accomplished by getting up close to it and scanning it, usually by zooming in to get a better vantage point. Your zoologist aunt, Jane, then asks you questions about the creature’s look and movement. Curiously, answering incorrectly has no consequences, as the creature’s info gets added to the Creature Guide regardless of your observations. The game, and Jane by extension, make it seem like you must pay attention to the distinctive markings and behaviors of the creatures, but nah, you can just answer randomly to get the same result. While it’s a pleasant experience to fly up to creatures and add them to the guide, there’s this persistent feeling that an extra step is missing in the process.

Thankfully, documenting creatures isn’t all you do in Flock, you’ll want to collect whistles scattered about the environment so you can charm them into following you as well. This process is more involved. You must get the corresponding creature’s whistle by unearthing it from various meadows that you graze with sheep. These meadows are also where you’ll find cosmetics for your character and, more importantly, baubles that increase the number of creatures you can hold in your flock. There’s no rhyme or reason as to the location of these whistles and the meadows they’re found in, but they are scattered evenly about, encouraging exploration at a nice consistent pace.

"You must synch up the two vertical lines several times to charm the various creatures within Flock’s world"

Once you have a whistle, it’s time to charm the corresponding creature into your flock. The presentation of the charming process is absolutely adorable. Your bird echoes the distinct melody played on the whistle to the creature, which engages you in a little minigame. The entirety of this charming minigame consists of lining up a frequency meter, which is based on your proximity to the creature. Lining up the meter can be irritating due to your bird’s turning radius just not being tight enough to accommodate the wild sporadic movements some creatures exhibit. While there is satisfaction in synchronizing the timing correctly, it does get repetitive, since every single creature requires this same process. Like with documenting creatures, it would have been nice to see this whistle minigame expanded a bit further, like maybe employing unique rhythms for each species instead of the same proximity button press applied universally. The game’s core mechanic being tied to a repetitive timed button press just feels underwhelming, even if it is ultimately enjoyable in a leisurely way.

"The map slowly expands as you lower more and more cloud layers."

By contrast, I have nothing to complain about regarding Flock’s exploration. Creatures exhibit carefully designed sound cues with distinct cries, which makes locating them within the environment very intuitive and natural. Visual landmarks are easy to ascertain as well, and the map allows you to pin points of interest and filter creature habitats. Going from one end of the map to another is made fun and painless thanks to the numerous linked arches and holes that give your bird bursts of speed. There’s also several whirlwind devices scattered about that push your bird high overhead so you can swoop down and cover vast distances with speed. Exploring the world of Flock is breezy and fun thanks to the clever map design.

Small gripes aside, Flock’s simplistic gameplay does accommodate its chill atmosphere and overall premise well. Take the flight controls as an example, there’s no way to control verticality whatsoever in the game. This is an intentional decision meant to streamline the experience, allowing the player to relax and focus on scanning the environment. The entirety of Flock’s content can also be shared with a friend through online co-op. You can’t really come up with a more chill image than two friends just soaring through the skies as they explore and document the wildlife together. Of course, that brings me to the most chill aspect of Flock overall, the aesthetic presentation.

"The visual palette of Flock‘s environments is a treat, and the day/night cycle allows different colors to shade the environment in unique ways"

The impressionistic painterly aesthetic of Flock serves the environments and creatures well. Inaccessible parts of the map are visualized by cloud cover, and these whispy clouds surround the entirety of the Upland environment that you’ll be spending your time in. This prevalence of clouds really gives the whole location a dreamy and whispy feel to it. The creatures all look adorable, with distinct designs characterizing their specific species. I particularly like the whale-like creatures that blow smoke as they float about. There’s a wide range of creature sounds, from cicada-esque cries of the shining Thrips to the geese-like honks of Gleebs. And finally, the music accompanies this Seussean dreamscape perfectly, with impressionistic harmonies and a focus on atmosphere over strong melodic hooks. The sound design in Flock is nothing short of exemplary and it’s one of the best things about the game.

There’s not much else to say about Flock. It’s a charming indie game about documenting and shepherding various creatures. You can technically ‘beat’ the game by completing all of Jane’s requests, and the credits song is well worth it, but it’s more about the journey. The game doesn’t have deeper lore or story significance than what’s on the surface, and I can’t fault it for that. The simplicity of the story and gameplay serves the artistic direction as a chill game quite well. However, documenting and charming creatures could have used some more mechanics to keep it from feeling repetitive. The premise of collecting data on creatures for a bunch of zoologists is rather similar to something like Pokemon Snap, while the atmosphere and feel of the game leans into Journey a bit more. Flock is not a groundbreaking game with deeper lore or secrets hiding below its charming surface; it wears its simplistic charm on its sleeve and is probably better for it.

This game was reviewed on the PC.