Here’s a serene time of it in the lovely, relaxing Flock. It’s a creature collecting open world time of exploration romp with a vibrant colour scheme like Hohokum (2014).

That’s due to some of the people behind that game returning to create Flock! The new studio is called Hollow Ponds and is based in London, with artist Richard Hogg returning with a psychedelic new visual scheme. Hurray!

Joyous Multiplayer (or solo) Flying Stuff in Flock

Right, so the Hohokum creator’s last studio was Honeyslug but this ended a while back. Great to see the team return with something new and exciting, though, with Flock launching in July 2024 on PC and Xbox.

This is actually a multiplayer experience and best played that way. But you can play alone if you so wish, but the dev’s intentions was for cooperative online multiplayer fun.

And we’ll leave that for them to explain below. Lazy by us? Yeah! Saves us from having to type out what you need to do (beware, British accents are ahead!).

Whilst we do think the game is primarily aimed at younger players, there’s no reason why adults can’t enjoy Flock either. Its woozy artistic charms are more than obvious—that’s illustrator Richard Hogg’s fantastic creative work in play.

The game draws you in with its looks and then offers chilled out flying action in response.

And the best bit about the game is soaring around, taking in the views, discovering the cartoony landscapes to gawp over. It’s a game you can very much just sit, stare at, and watch over merely playing it.

As a relaxing enterprise, Flock is outstanding. It smashes that goal out of the park. As a long-term gameplay experience, it’s somewhat lacking—some gaming critics have provided sniffy 3/5 type scores as a result.

Flock is something of a glorified animal collector, but it does this so well and with such charm we can forgive its shortcomings. This is a beautiful game, one that people who don’t play (or appreciate) video games can get a better grasp of the industry and everything it has to offer (i.e. not just shooty boom boom type games).

Yet it is, by design it seems, quite cut back—unchallenging.

Some gamers may have an issue  with that side of things, but for us this was a most welcome bit of escapism. Even if the experience is quite brief (several hours of gameplay), you do feel compelled to return and start over.

That’s the cosy charm! And we must add to that the rather nice score to go with all of this floaty stuff, too, by video game composer Eli Rainsberry.

Flock delivers on its looks. It’s a breeze—there’s a flight and fancy about proceedings that’ll wow kids and make adults swoon. And if you don’t want to experience that, go and rant your fury on Twitter or some such.