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Taxonomists don’t get much of a look in when it comes to video games. Or birdwatchers, for that matter. Something about the slow, meticulous nature of these activities has proven hard to render in pixel form — but that’s where Flock comes in. Forget high-octane, all-action spectacles, this is a game about the slow-paced joys of waiting, observing and classifying.
All the descriptions of Flock call it a game about “the joy of flight”, but it’s as much about stopping as it is about soaring. As a Bird Rider, your days consist of piloting a colourful bird around a lush landscape called the Uplands, making you the ideal candidate to help your aunt and zoology professor Jane compile a guide to the local creatures. These eccentric beings are somehow connected with a thick fog blanketing the land, so it’s up to you to find them and restore some visibility to the landscape.
To do this, you’ll need to glide around looking for flashes of colour in the grass and listening for distinctive trills amid the trees. Each of the 12 invented families of animals has a number of species, each with different traits, and it’s your job to match their descriptions to the animals you see. The pink-nosed cosmet, for example, always has a nose a different colour from its body; the puffing drupe, meanwhile, leaves a trail of smoke in its wake. There’s not a lot at stake — if you get it wrong, well, you can just try again until Jane agrees with your assessment.
Identification is only one half of the process, however. Once you’ve located a creature, you can attempt to charm them by mimicking their call in order to add them to your flock. Hazy are both the ethics of this (am I imprisoning these poor beasts in some kind of trailing multicoloured circus?) and its purpose. Sometimes Jane’s students will ask to see the species you’ve charmed, but to begin with you seem to be doing it simply to look fabulous as you fly about.
Which begs something of an existential question for Flock. The game controls the height of the bird for you and will prevent you from slamming beak-first into boulders in your flight path. So if you can’t swoop and soar on a whim (let alone experimentally self-destruct), is it really a game about the joy and possibility of flight?
There are titles like Journey and Limbo, so abstract and mysterious in their execution that the sheer joy of discovery is enough to carry your curiosity on. There are games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, outwardly cutesy but with surprising depth to their game mechanics. But Flock doesn’t fit in either of these circles: it’s pretty but not screen-meltingly so, abstract but not without instructions, engaging but eventually repetitive.
As the creatures you’re looking for become increasingly elusive, the process for spotting them becomes more of a chore as you’re forced to stare really hard at rocks and work out if they’re sentient beings. While there are the makings of a uniquely restful and quirky game here, Flock never quite finds a way of raising its gameplay into the stratosphere. In the end, the result is a flight memorable as much for its turbulence as for its triumphs.
★★★☆☆
On PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S now
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