Collecting creatures has never been so fascinating and beautiful.
Down in the centre of Brighton, where the city meets the sea, and resting beneath the trellis shadow of a burnt-out hotel, is a traffic crossing where someone has stuck a set of plastic googly eyes onto one of the little green men. I don’t know how long these things will last, but if you’re anywhere near them in the next few days you’ll probably still be able to spot them. I spotted it because I was out with my daughter and she always spots these things: a little green man staring back at us as we waited to cross the road with the rest of the human crowd.
Noticing is a hot topic right now. Have you noticed? There are best-selling books on how to pay more attention. On TikTok, you scroll and pause at videos of rain falling on streets, seabeds colored by the ripples of surface water above, fleeting shapes forming and disappearing into sun-rimmed clouds. Tagline: the art of noticing. Here is where beauty and riches are found, here are gifts that are only available if you first teach yourself to see them.
And then there’s Flock, and Flock feels very much at one with these things. It’s a game about wildlife, and it’s a game about collecting stuff. But it’s also, as a foundation for all of those things, a game about noticing. The world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you’re ready for it. Only when you’re in sync, only when you’re attuned.
A little taxonomy up front. Well, a little pedigree, anyway. Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. This is the team that made the near-indescribable snake-control game Hohokum — “snake-control game” is a truly awful description for a game as wandering, restless, and experimental as this one — and there’s a bit of Hohokum’s writhing, propulsive movement in there as you glide through the air 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, zipping through it as if it were just one big junk shop. Flock has something of that, too.
But most of all, Flock is just Flock—and that’s more than enough. You set off from a hilltop to explore a landscape of grass and rocks and moss and concrete and wetlands. You ride on the back of a friendly red bird, and you hunt for examples of local wildlife. As you find more of these examples, the world expands and more of these creatures become available. How do you hunt them? Actually, 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 this works in a couple of ways. Upon arrival in a new area, a handful of creatures will just be scurrying around, flying through the air, sunning themselves on concrete, sniffing through the grass. Everything about Flock is gentle and slightly comical—everything is at home in a world of googly-eyed green men—so these flying, sunning, sniffing creatures will have sugar-coated rainbow stripes, derby-cane Gonzo noses, slick little wings that hold them aloft. Spot more of them and they begin to sort themselves into families: Gleebs, Winnows, my beloved Thrips. But not all will be so easy to spot.
Some are only available at certain times of day, and the day rolls beautifully across the sky here, delivered in 1970s snapshots of pink and purple and gold light, while the night turns everything a rich blue as a huge pearlescent moon hangs in the sky. Those thrips, which light up as they buzz around, often only appear around trees as darkness falls. Other creatures need the morning before they make their rounds. Others will only bask in the afternoon.
But the time of day is still only part of it. Other creatures need a certain environment – trees, long grass, but also swamps, a certain lucky hill. Some hide in clumps of fallen leaves. Others disguise themselves as rocks. Some have specific calls to listen for.
So from this simple point, there are already two ways to look in Flock. In one, you ride around on the bird and search for creatures in the open air. But in the second, you switch to a first-person focus mode, or you settle into a perch and zoom in on the details. This is how you search for the things that don’t really want to be found, that have found ingenious, sometimes complicated ways to hide themselves.
There are tools for this quest of yours. You’ll collect a list of every creature you encounter, arranged into neat families, and every missing niche on the list will have a little clue pointing you in a vague direction. Some creatures might take a liking to a particular part of the expanding biome. Some might require you to track down a male species first. Some have near-complete recipes for discovering them, and some have only the most devious, flimsy Cryptic Crossword clues. But it’s enough. These prompts, combined with an environment that just begs to be discovered, are enough to see you through.
It all works, and feels so unique, for a handful of reasons. The first is that movement is beautiful. Flock controls your height for you, so you just pick a direction and a speed and set off. The world glides past you, around you, features of the landscape pushing you high into the air. You move forward, but never just forward. There’s a subtle sense of warp to your momentum, as if you’re a stylus in the groove of a spinning record. It’s a joy to set off and see where you end up, winding through forests, picking at moss, running up fauvist trees and up the soft, even Ravilious hills and hollows, encountering strange, sculpted chunks of old broken concrete that hint at an artful past that can never be recovered.
And then there’s the creature design, which is by turns mad and magical. Here are treble clefs and air quotes and carpet runners rippling through the hidden thermals of the air. They’re ridiculous fantasies, to which I say: Have you seen any real birds lately? The bumbling admiral on patrol who is the overfed seagull, the watercolour spirit we call the Jay, finished in rust and sea blue and with a dot matrix printer for a voice? Flocks’ bestiary feels like scribbling, but it also feels like it was born of studying nature, of really looking at it, of 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, charm them with a simple mini-game, and add them to the ever-growing crowd of animals that you simply follow. It’s beautiful stuff.)
And finally, Flock works so well because of a secret ingredient that goes hand in hand with noticing, which illuminates everything from within.
This ingredient? When the writer Helen Macdonald was young and on a birdwatching trip with her father, restless and perhaps a little frustrated by all the waiting, something brilliant happened.
“And then my father looked at me,” they write in H is for Hawk, “half annoyed, half amused and [he] explained something. He explained patience. He said the most important thing to remember was this: that when you wanted to see something very much, sometimes you had to stay still, stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it, and be patient.”
Flock does this. And it does this with great audacity. Time is compressed in a video game: a little bit of time passing can take a huge toll. Flock knows this beyond any doubt, and yet it will force you to be still and wait and watch—and it will make this waiting and watching last much longer than you might initially expect. And so the other day I literally spent fifteen minutes under a pink-leafed tree waiting for something I just knew would appear, and when it did, I screamed with joy. I spent an entire night in the wetlands—a human, non-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 tiny piece of Lego and had to pace back and forth, plowing the carpet with my eyes while a hot pain burrowed into my brain. It was wonderful to wait in Flock. It was wonderful to be patient. I was paying attention. I was ready for good things to happen. I was exactly where I needed to be.
This is my Flock, anyway, and yours might be different. There’s a whole questline about tracking down stolen items, with sheep having to eat the grass on certain hills. There’s that charming creature component, and that alone will be fascinating to some players. And then there’s the fact that Flock is made to be played online with friends, friends who float and glide across the round earth, noticing things together.
But for me, it’s a solo affair. Give me the moonlight, give me my beloved Thrips to roam overhead. Give me that moment when I’ve studied the creature catalogue and the map and the landscape so intently that when a sausage-like, trumpet-nosed creature appears in the distance and I realize I’ve never seen it before, I immediately think: Bewls. That’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.