Review: Flock Is a Delightful and Cozy Flight

There aren’t many games out there like Flock. It’s a flight sim. It’s a creature collector. It’s a mystery game. It’s a puzzle game. All of these descriptions apply, but not exactly. Flock is a strange beast, which is appropriate when it’s a game all about finding strange beasts.

You play as a bird rider heading to visit their zoology professor aunt Jane, who has a task for you. She wants you to document the creatures of the land around her home and lower the cloud level in the process. You achieve this through observation, documentation and a system of whistles.

Gameplay in Flock is simple. You fly around a small open world, on the lookout for creatures hopping around the land. You fly close to them, observe them and use Jane’s notes to determine which creature you’re looking at, gradually filling up a creature book with details. In addition, you can find whistles for different types of creature, allowing you to charm them and get them to follow you around, which is the flock of the game’s title.

That’s it. That’s the game. It’s the most basic of mechanics and yet Flock manages to be delightfully compelling. Flying around the world feels good, for a start. The lack of friction to the movement makes it feel playful. This is enhanced by ring structures that can be dashed through and chained together for a satisfying drift through the skies. You’ll be swooping, drifting and coasting around to your heart’s content and loving every minute of it.

Seeking out creatures is also a joy. Flock doesn’t openly point them out to you. Instead, you have to listen out for any noises they might be making while staying vigilant for movement in the grass or in the trees. A glow in the woods at night could be something, while careful examination of a lakebed might reveal a pair of eyes peering out of the sand. Flock wants you to stop and carefully examine your surroundings, leave no stone unturned and keep making new discoveries.

This is the main draw of Flock, in fact. Because you have to make all these discoveries yourself, using only single line clues in the guide along with your own intuition, it’s extremely rewarding to find new creatures. You’ll see something wiggle in a rock formation and immediately work out out the correct distance to observe without spooking it. You’ll hear persistently loud chirping from tall grass and delight to find a weird duck in there. You’ll peer into a rock and be surprised to see something peering back.

The vagueness of these clues may be maddening to more impatient completionists, however. Some creatures require some meticulous searching, while the hints can sometimes be too vague for their own good. It’s a huge appeal for someone like me, with my love of slowly figuring out puzzles, but it may not be to everyone’s taste.

The vibes are immaculate for this gentle kind of experience though. The visual style is all bold colors and pastel shades, which means every part of this game is gorgeous to look at. The character designs are charming too. The creatures are all bizarre little hybrids based on various fish and birds, all marked by big eyes and pronounced features. Some have goofy little beaks, some are tiny beans that are mostly all eye, and some are whale-like beasts with huge maws. One creature, the Gormless Skyfish, is a happily clueless, bug-eyed fish identified by it being “no thoughts head empty”, and I love it so much.

These adorable designs even extend to the few human characters, including your own avatar. They remind me of Muppets, all big faces and noodly limbs. You can even get very silly with your characters, dressing them in a poncho and wading trousers, among other things. The silliness of these character designs is enhanced by the writing, which fills the dialogue with a ton of charm and humor. Your uncle Reg, for instance, is single-mindedly into sheep, where he’ll dismiss any earth-shattering natural discoveries you make simply because he can’t shear them for wool.

Sheep are also a mechanic in Flock, but they’re one of the parts that don’t feel fully realized. You can collect a flock of sheep in addition to the regular beasties, and their role is to graze on overgrown meadows. This reveals Burgling Bewls that have stolen the various whistles you need to charm creatures, as well as new clothes and space for more creatures. But they can’t be used for anything else and you can’t spread multiple sheep onto multiple meadows at once. They feel like they were added simply to have a collectible system on top of the standard creature collecting, and it doesn’t feel fully fleshed out as an idea.

That said, this minor use is a step-up from how limited the actual flock of the title feels. As you find creatures, you can use the various whistles to initiate a mini-game where you must blow the whistle at the appropriate distance to charm them into following you. As the game progresses, you become a full-fledged Pied Piper, with everything you’ve charmed following you in a big group.

However, they do nothing. They don’t help search for more creatures, they can’t be sent into crevices to pull out other friends and they can’t help chase down the faster beasts. They just sit there behind your bird, looking pretty and making noises if you press the right button to squawk at them. I feel it would add so much to the game if different creatures had different uses that aided in your search for the final entries. Despite the game being named after it, this flock doesn’t do much of anything, and that’s disappointing.

This feeling of ideas not being fully realized adds to a general feeling of repetition that runs through the game. The gameplay loop is very much swooping around, marking creatures in your book and heading off to do the next one. As a low-stakes game for short chillout gameplay sessions, this is perfect, but it does make the game feel a little tedious if you play for too long in one sitting.

However, most of these criticisms are nitpicks. If you’re willing to approach Flock on its own terms, most of this washes away. It lulls you into its atmosphere with ease. It’s also designed to be played co-op, as you and your fellow bird riders can soar around together. I never got to experience this aspect of the game, but I imagine it adds a lot.

Flock is a comfort blanket of a game. Its simplicity isn’t for everyone but it’s hard to deny its charm. If you’re looking for something cozy to kick back with at the end of a long day, Flock is exactly what you need.

Flock is available now for the PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.