How close can you get making a Pokemon game before Nintendo sues you?
That seems to be the question that an alarmingly large number of developers seem to be asking everyone with the litany of Pokemon adjacent games that have been making their way of late. To be sure Nintendo doesn’t own the creature collector trope, but you’re playing with fire if you seek to replicate any of the more iconic features that IP has. So now developers play around the edges, doing enough to distance themselves from the IP whilst still trying to capture some of that magic that got us all hooked on Pokemon as kids. Flock then feels like the literal embodiment of creature collection because that’s really all it is. Whilst simplicity is always something I drive for from indie developers I can’t help but feel that this experience was a little under baked, lacking that little extra something that would’ve made worth playing for longer than a couple hours.
A great mist has arisen, hiding away the great plains that lie beneath your families mountains. Strangely though it seems as if some of the creatures around this place have something to do with it, the mist seemingly falling when you catch sight of some rare creatures just on the horizon. So your family gives you an easy task: track down all the creatures of the land, build your flock and find those rare creatures so the eerie mist can be dealt with once and for all.
Hollow Pond’s art style has been iterated and improved on with Flock, retaining the same levels of high stylization and low poly count that they used in their previous title I Am Dead. The wide open environments feel a lot more kind to this art style too, the visual confusion I suffered in their previous game no longer a problem in the sweeping vistas that are simply bursting with all kinds of colour. The day/night cycles add a lot of dynamism to the environments as well making them feel much more alive than if they were just static the whole time. Performance is great too, something which I’m sure previous gen console players (how many of you are there out there, really?) are sure to appreciate.
The premise of flock is simple: gotta catch em all identify all the creatures. There’s different categories of creatures that all share the same base attributes and, when you find them, you’ll have to align them to a known type to identify them. You can then collect different whistles to lure those creatures into your flock and they’ll happily tag along as you continue collecting more. A special type of creature are the sheep who, upon being fed grass from specific knolls, can have their wool harvested to make various garments for you to wear. Especially rare creatures will require a bit more than tracking them down before you can add them to your flock though, so there’s a few puzzle challenges along the way as well. It’s a simple premise and one that doesn’t demand a lot of your time if you don’t want it to.
Whilst flying around, exploring and identifying creatures is fun enough for a period it quickly starts to get repetitive. Sure, chasing down those weird animal calls you hear can be a bit of fun but after you’ve done it a couple dozen times you start to wonder if there’s anything else this game has to offer. There is in the handful of other mini-games and progression mechanics (read: cosmetics) that you can chase down, but none of those are things that really enticed me to stay around much longer.
Perhaps this is because I played it by myself and without banter from another friend to fill in the gaps between the game’s various mechanics I found myself instead questioning what I was doing here. If I’m honest I’m also not sure what’s different about the multiplayer experience either, something which I’ve since learned might be critical to actually enjoying the game itself (my review of Space Hulk of many years ago apparently suffers from this same issue). Does that mean that all is forgiven for this game? Heck no, but it’s worth considering if you are looking to play this.
Strangely, for an indie dev who was previously heavily narrative focused, Flock is mostly bereft of any overarching narrative to drive things forward. To be sure there’s a larger goal you’re working towards, but it’s so surface level that it doesn’t really function to help drive the game forward. The various bits of dialogue with characters is similarly short and sharp with little world building done to make it all interesting. Again, I might be missing the point here, but suffice to say that the lack of narrative was one of the key reasons I didn’t feel a significant drive to play anymore than I did.
Flock to me then is a game I simply don’t understand. Whilst all the ingredients are there for a competent, casual game it seemingly fails to coalesce into something that I would enjoy. Perhaps it’s because I played this all by my lonesome, maybe the mechanics are too simple for me or is it just that I’m not really into the creature collector genre anymore? These are questions I don’t feel like I have firm answers to and, unfortunately, don’t have much desire to explore further with Flock.
Rating: 6.5/10
Flock is available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S right now for $29.95 or on Xbox Gamepass for free. Game was played on the PC with a total of 1.6 hours total playtime and 15% of the achievements unlocked.
