Down in central Brighton, where the city meets the sea, and resting under the latticed shadow of a burned-out hotel, there’s a traffic crossing where someone has stuck a set of plastic googly eyes on one of the green men. I don’t know how long these things last, but if you’re around in the next few days you can probably still see it. I noticed it because I was out with my daughter and she always notices these things: a green man who stared back at us while we waited to cross the road with the rest of the human throng.
Flock reviewPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveDeveloper: Hollow Ponds, Richard HoggAvailability: Out 16th July for PC, Xbox One, Xbox X/S, PS4 and PS5.
Noticing things is having a bit of a moment just now. Have you noticed this? There are best-selling books telling you how to pay attention more effectively. On TikTok you’ll scroll and stop on videos of rainfall on city streets, seabeds stained with the ripple of surface water overhead, fleeting shapes forming and unforming in the sun-rimmed clouds. Tagline: the art of noticing. Here you’ll find beauty and riches, here are gifts that are only available if you’ve first taught yourself to see them.
And then there’s Flock, and Flock feels very much of a piece with this sort of thing. It’s a game about wildlife and it’s a game about collecting stuff. But it’s also, serving as bedrock for all of that other stuff, a game about noticing. Its world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you’re ready. Only when you’re in sync, only when you’re properly attuned.
A bit of taxonomy up front. Well, a bit of lineage anyway. Flock is the latest game from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. This is the team that made the almost indescribable snake-controlling game Hohokum – “snake-controlling game” is a truly terrible description for a game as roving, restless, and experimental as this – and there’s a little of Hohokum’s sinuous, propulsive movement here as you send yourself skimming through the skies 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. You rustle through it all like it’s just one big junk shop. There’s something of this to Flock too.