Switzerland-based Okomotive are here to escape from dystopia once again. In their previous Far: Lone Sails and its sequel, you played a child operating a cutaway landship that often resembled a rampaging beast – the last surviving specimen of a race of monstrous engines, carrying you rightward through empty cities and petrified industry towards some kind of new beginning. Okomotive’s latest game Herdling flips the poles of the metaphor somewhat, even as it shifts to 3D movement: rather than a bestial machine, you’re driving a herd of intriguingly robotic “Calicorn” beasts to a promised land beyond the peaks.
The game starts with your character – another tenacious, faceless kid in red – waking up beneath a flyover and discovering the first of the Calicorns in an alleyway. You usher your hairy charges through desolate streets haunted by the roar of traffic, coming to a tourist billboard that shows some Calicorns gazing up at a mountain – this being your unspoken final destination.
The very end of the game and that billboard are basically the same thing, in that both seek to capitalise upon yearnings for a rustic, unpolluted Elsewhere. As a story about ‘getting back to nature’, I don’t think Herdling has much to say. It feels less sophisticated than Lone Sails, more straightforwardly utopian in its tale of an impoverished sprog and companion creatures retreating from the woebegone scrapyard of modernity. But as a study of human/animal relations and how they can be performed by game design, it’s sort of engrossing. Also, it has Okomotive’s usual captivating soundscape, and those mountains are certainly easy on the eyes.
Sometimes when analysing a game, it’s helpful to start by forgetting all context. What is a herd, according to Herdling alone? It’s a single shape – a blob that stretches into a wedge during motion, and congeals into a rough oval when at rest. You stand behind the blob and wave your sorcerous shepherd’s staff to send a conduit of flowers through its heart, as though tracing a compass needle. The herd then moves in the direction of the line.
Scramble around the outside of the blob and wave your staff again to whistle it onto a different trajectory. Hold a button to make it move slower, when you’re navigating dangerous terrain. Slash it back and forth to have the blob power through denser undergrowth. Double-tap another button to stop the blob in place. Hammer and hold that button to have the blob knuckle down against gale-force winds – a brief challenge towards the end of the game.
Usefully, you do not shape and steer the blob in first-person. You’re given a third-person camera that gently pulls back into panorama when there’s something spectacular on the horizon. Without the convenience of that drone camera – so subtle in its shifts, so easy to take for granted – Herdling would be a much harder experience, and possibly a more intriguing one. You’d be part of the blob, down there in the stink and heave of bovine musculature, unable to scry the routes and obstacles.
Your Calicorns are branded blue, yellow and red, and these colours also suffuse the world and highlight its sparse spread of collectibles. Blue flowers fill up a gauge that allows you to channel the wind and initiate a stampede – whether for the sheer glee of it, or to force the herd up a slippery glacier. Red flowers initiate or prolong a stampede automatically: they’re Mario Kart speed pads. Yellow flowers pollinate fur with a painterly energy that can be vented to restore old murals, unlocking the path through certain ruins that plug into backstory dream visions of primordial Calicorns and their shepherds. The three primary colours repeat obsessively throughout those ruins, as though the geography itself were the hide of a Calicorn.
Beyond the urban prologue, you’ll rescue a dozen other Calicorns along the route to that promised mountain. The “taming” process is necessarily streamlined: you might have to fetch a wounded Calicorn a health-restoring fruit to earn its trust, but mostly, you just walk up and do a QTE, as in the rather less cuddly Far Cry Primal. Then you get to name them. I named all mine after colleagues, which was very amusing until I ran out of colleagues and had to tunnel into PixelArena.io’s recent history of departures and layoffs.
The Calicorns come in all shapes and sizes. Some are built like Yorkshire terriers, bobbling along adorably on stumpy legs. Others are ponderous emperor penguins in cassocks. Some of the Calicorns have or acquire traits, such as “Brave” (that would be hardware editor James) and “Rascal” (that would be our old editor in chief Graham – RPS in peace).
Detailed in the pause menus, these behaviours didn’t make a huge impression on me during my review playthrough, even at periodic campfire intervals where the herd spreads out in a stagey way, and you can do things like hoik a ball to play fetch. You can also pet Calicorns, pull twigs and branches from their hides, and adorn them with the baubles and harnesses that litter the landscape. These last three actions don’t have any functional impact that I noticed: they’re simply an opportunity to express affection, a chance to bond with individual Calicorns.
I can’t say I ever really bonded with my Calicorns. Partly, this was because I decorated them at random, according to my gamerbrain understanding that Thou Shalt Leave No Collectible Behind. By the end of Herdling – my playthrough lasted four hours – it was like leading a battalion of bellowing Christmas trees.
The wider complexity is that the game’s efforts to sell you on the individuality of Calicorns are at odds with the practical need to treat them as a blob, a tension I’d have loved Okomotive to do a lot more with. The major consequence of taming Calicorns is that the blob becomes harder to wield. Calicorns may bumble about a little, snagging on spiked scenery or breakable objects, even falling off cliffs at scripted intervals if you’re not watchful. It’s fiddly enough that you start to think twice about later additions. When I was deep in the woods, trying to navigate a labyrinth of smashable alarm totems and evade the fury of massive demon owls, I found myself regretting the addition of Ollie (our guides editor) to my herd, “Affectionate” though he may be.
The owls are Herdling’s antagonists, a predator population who, if I’m deciphering the wordless backstory correctly, have driven the Calicorn from their old stomping grounds. They are harrowing presences, their ivory masks glimmering in the mists, but they’re also, surely, stand-ins for the real villains of the piece: all those bloody humans who built the awful urban junk you’re journeying away from.
That last observation falls flat, of course, because in Herdling you are playing a human, presiding over nonhuman animal lives in what is at least partly a self-serving fashion. Caretaking responsibilities aside, you periodically require the Calicorns to shove boulders and trunks out of the path. They also willingly serve as platforms when you need to scale a ledge and complete a very simple terrain puzzle – handy, given that you don’t have a jump button. In this way, Herdling explores a desire to be intimate with other creatures while also using them.
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The game’s real shepherd could be its score, another surging collection of heart-inflating orchestral tracks from composer Joel Schoch. As in Far: Lone Sails, this as much an album as a videogame, which explains the tight running length: the snow-blown hills and escarpments often feel secondary, structured around the peaks and troughs of the music.
The invisible orchestra is another kind of herd that mirrors the one you drive before you – sometimes devolving to individual performers when your beasts are scattered, only to gather itself furiously when the Calicorns are in full flight. It’s a lovely audible modelling of a disorderly group of beings in motion. It’s also an audible expression of your power over those beings and the limits of their simulated autonomy.