Herdling – Review

herdling, okomotive

Introduction

Few things in video games have earned as much ire from players as escort missions. Many of us can think of at least one time we were saddled with babysitting an annoying NPC that lacked all sense of self-preservation. Generally, it is a part of game design that likely draws a groan rather than a cheer from gamers. Before playing Herdling, the new adventure game from developer Okomotive, I wasn’t sure if the devs were brave or foolish to make a game that is essentially one long escort mission.

Now, after playing it for 4 hours and rolling credits, I still don’t have an answer to that query. But I do know now that, despite some technical issues and a narrative that never really grabbed me, Herdling is brilliant, beautiful, and above all, heartwarming.

Premise

Herdling is a 3rd person adventure game where you play as a young orphan sleeping rough on the streets of a cold and uncaring city. After being woken up by a car alarm, you discover a small trail of hoofprints and broken fences leading to a lumbering creature hidden in the dark. On closer inspection, you can see it is an animal with large twisted horns and covered in thick, shaggy hair: this is a Calicorn. After picking up a tree branch and helping the Calicorn get the bucket off its head, the creature settles down, and now you can tame it.

Spread across 7 chapters, Herdling is a journey out into the vast and low-level fantastical world beyond the city walls, gathering more Calicorns to grow your herd, and shepherding them through various environmental obstacles and puzzles to the top of a faraway mountain.

I say low-level fantastical because the world of Herdling is not exactly like our own, with a layer of mysticism blanketing it. There is a kind of natural magic, an energy that passes between all living things and the world itself. The dark, claustrophobic, and non-magical cityscape where you start is in clear contrast to this, giving Herdling a strong foundation for its gameplay, narrative, and themes.

Herdling has a narrative that is told via murals found along your path and visions you see when you sleep, with no text or audio delivery, neatly skirting around any localisation issues. While I found the imagery evocative and understood that these images were tied to my journey, I didn’t find myself excited to see the next one, wondering what revelations it would deliver. Whether I was following the beats of a folktale or walking in another herder’s footsteps, it didn’t really matter to me, as that didn’t feel like my reason for doing this.

What I got caught up in during my time with Herdling was my own journey, my time with my herd of Calicorns, and the themes of the game. Herdling, to me, is a game about reconnecting. Reconnecting with history, culture, and stories that are no longer shared. Reconnecting with nature, a world that humanity seemingly hides from, throwing up walls to keep it at bay. So much has been forgotten, and as I ventured further and further away from the shadows of the city, I realised that the natural world had forgotten humanity as well. It is something that will no doubt resonate with a great many people, as it did for me, and speaks to the game’s environmental worldbuilding, art direction, and gameplay.

Gameplay

As I said in the introduction of this review, Herding is an adventure game built around the throughline of an escort quest. You guide your herdling from the rear, shepherding them in the opposite direction from where you are. Using the tree branch you picked up as a guiding stick, you can order your herd of Calicorns to move forward, stop, slow down, and stampede using various commands. While the majority of the game takes a slower, more methodical pace, the moments where you get to cut loose and let your herdling stampede down a hill break up the pacing in a fun, exhilarating way.

Stampeding uses up a charge that you can see at the bottom of your screen, and the number of charges is dependent upon how many healthy Calicorns are in your herdling. Stampede charges can be regained by having your herd or yourself move through patches of flowers. You’ll know when a Calicorn has a charge, as flecks of red, blue, and yellow appear on their horns and coat; the magic of the natural world imbues them with power.

You’ll have to look after your growing herd as you find more along your journey and encounter obstacles and threats. Feeding, cleaning, and petting your Calicorns are all key to their upkeep, and on occasion, a game of catch. Your Calicorns depend on you, not just to lead them, but to protect them; honestly, they would be helpless without you. There are also harnesses and decorations you can adorn your herd in, adding a little more colour and personality to each one.

While your Calicorns are pretty helpless, they aren’t useless. At points along your journey, you’ll face some light environmental puzzles, some of which require your herdling’s input. They can assist the player character in pushing heavy objects or boosting their shepherd up high ledges. The player character can move independently of the herdling, allowing you to manoeuvre as needed, as well as explore and interact with the world separately. Luckily, there are no random threats that will show up if you wander too far from your herdling, but you cannot press on without them.

This trek is not without its dangers, from precarious cliffs and hidden crevasses to giant shrieking bird creatures looking to pluck a Calicorn for its dinner! You’ll have to carefully navigate around obstacles and traps, and be wary if one of your herd gets caught in a hazard. There is a decent variety to these threats and obstacles, and adjusting my playstyle for each one added to my enjoyment, adding some zest.

Unfortunately, it was during one of these more intense sequences that the AI of my herdling played up, snagging on a wall and losing all sense of direction, ultimately leading to my first Calicorn, Loma, being killed. Despite all the great design and hard work Okomtive has put into Herdling, it seems that all escort games will deal with issues with AI pathing and behaviour. This wasn’t a common occurrence, and other than a few flickering textures and the odd drop in framerate, my experience with Herdling was smooth.

I will say, though, that as a result of my misfortune, I got to experience facets of the game which I wouldn’t have been privy to if I hadn’t experienced the loss. Herdling had already surprised me by how I felt on losing Loma, but to see what came ofter that loss not only surprised me but moved me.

Your relationship with your herdling, this docile pack of Calicorns, is the core to the game; a microcosm of your reconnection to this world you are rediscovering. It is fragile, it is hard work to maintain, and it hurts when it breaks, but it is worth it.

Visuals

Herdling is beautiful, with stunning vistas waiting around nearly every corner or over the next rise. Each chapter is based in a new region, from the dense woods of the Autumn Forest to the windswept slopes of the Snowfields. I can’t tell you the number of times I stopped in my tracks and just looked out over some of the most breathtaking natural landscapes I have seen in gaming. Honestly, some of the screenshots I took during my playthrough look like landscape paintings at a glance.

The game’s colour palette feels very grounded, save for the brief moments of natural magic that appear throughout. Echoes of this magic can be seen in the ancient ruins left behind by civilisation, flecked with red, blue, and yellow. The same colours that appear on the Calicorns’ horns when stampeding. Clearly, your predecessors were aware of this magic, adorning their homes and creating murals with its colours, which I spotted being echoed in the drawings over the player character’s bed at the start of the game. The magic is forgotten, but it hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by these colours.

There is a serene emptiness to Herdling’s world that I found calming at some points and unnerving at others; a constant reminder of my and my Calicorns’ vulnerability. That emptiness exists in part because there is barely any other wildlife to be seen throughout the game, save for the monstrous birds that you encounter and the Calicorns.

I found the design of the bird creatures very effective, like some sort of giant buzzard wearing a death mask, and coupled with the tense stealth gameplay, it was clear that they were the predators and we were their prey.

The Calicorns are the star of the show, though, and I loved their various designs from the larger, more lumbering type with their broad horns and large eyes, to their smaller, seemingly bearded brethren that shuffled along beside them. There is enough about their appearance to make them feel both familiar and not at the same time, making them approachable but still fascinating.

Please don’t confuse the emptiness I mentioned earlier with lifelessness, as Herdling’s environmental and character animations bring the whole game to life. Every region’s unique aesthetic and atmosphere are enhanced by suitable weather effects and animations, whether it is a soft breeze and the swaying grass of the open plains, the bubbling brook at the entrance to the thick forest, or the powerful icy winds at the summit of the mountain.

The gentle, docile nature of the Calicorns and their personalities that poke through their thick coats become apparent through their movements, behaviours, and interactions with the player character. Watching the colours flash across their horns as they stampede, every swish of the player character’s stick, or just the way that they all settle down at a campfire to sleep, every action, great and small, carries a magic I find quite hard to describe.

Sound

The soundtrack of Herdling feels like it rises from the world itself, a natural accompaniment that matches not only the environment you are in, but the action on screen. It rises and falls with your speed, gentle strings and woodwinds weaving in and out of earshot while you walk, becoming a thundering call to action with loud drums kicking in as you stampede, the music swelling with an exuberance that matches your herdling’s energy.

Herdling’s sound design fills in the gaps of the game’s soundscape, providing the natural ambience you’d expect from a game like this. The Calicorns’ grunts, huffs, and sniffles reminded me of camels, deep and abrupt. It felt like listening to the chatting amongst themselves as we wandered forward, their conversation punctuating the air at random intervals. Not a word is spoken throughout Herdling, but a lot is said through its art, design, and world.

Conclusion

Looking after my herdling of Calicorns, guiding them through a beautiful and dangerous world, and seeing the connection between my player character, their charges, and the world around them grow, was a rich, rewarding experience. While the Calicorns’ AI and technical issues snagged at times, and the alluded-to narrative didn’t draw me in, I felt myself getting more caught up in it with each new chapter. Okomotive has done something truly special; made an enjoyable escort mission that lasted a full game, where I was more enamoured with my charges by the end than when I started!

Like the Calicorns, Herdling is a bit slow to start, but it gathers momentum throughout until the game reaches its top speed in its final chapters, delivering a satisfying ending that neatly punctuates Herdling’s themes of reconnecting with history, culture, and the world around us.