Cozy games have always been there, but it wasn't until the last few years that these types of games got a name and loose definition. Farming games like Harvest Moon fall into this designation, as do lifestyle games like Animal Crossing. Titles like Slime Rancher, A Short Hike, and Lil' Gator Game are also classified as being experiences where adversarial actions are omitted in favor of taking in the adventure. Flock is the latest game to occupy the cozy game subgenre, and the experience is just as fulfilling as we'd hoped it would be.

You play the role of a bird rider who's been asked to visit your aunt and uncle in the Uplands. Your aunt wants to chronicle all of the wildlife in the area, and while she has student assistants to help, your mastery of bird riding means you can do the job faster and perhaps better. With your trusty bird, you take off for the skies to find and document the creatures — and a few new birds along the way. You'll also be looking for things that have been stolen by creatures called Burgling Bewls.

The gameplay mechanics can be split into three distinct parts. The first is the actual observation and documenting part of the game. Once you find the creature and see the prompt, you get into an observation phase, where the camera automatically follows the creature while still granting you control of the camera's rotation. From there, you can identify which family the creature belongs to and select the correct name from a list, based on brief one-line descriptions.

For the early segments, you can fly to the creature to start the identification process. Later on, it takes some guile and stealth before you can initiate the ID process. In both cases, what makes the whole thing exciting and a bit challenging is that the game doesn't give you a constant on-screen map or any indicators or markers to let you know where to find the creatures. You have to do things the old-fashioned way, where you'll depend on sight and listen for certain calls to figure out where a creature is located.

Once you get rid of your dependence on those common helpers in games, the discovery process starts to feel fulfilling. This is especially true when you go for the bigger mythical creatures in the world that require keen observational skills to locate and identify. That gets amplified once you unlock more regions to explore and notice that the time of day also affects when creatures will appear. At the same time, you can seek out your aunt's students who are hanging out in the area. To make the process a tad easier, the students can provide tips about where some creatures like to hang out.

One thing that may divide players is the actual identification process. On the one hand, Flock doesn't penalize you for incorrect guesses. Pick the wrong family, and your aunt immediately selects the correct family . Make an incorrect name guess, and you'll be told to keep trying until you get things right. It fits the cozy ethos in that you aren't being punished for making mistakes, but it also means that you can button-mash your way through each answer until you get the correct one.

The second distinct part of the game is in the recovery of the items that were stolen by the Burgling Bewls. As you see at the game's start, the bewls hide in large bushes, and you'll need sheep to lure them out. When the bewls scurry away, you can find what they had taken. While the creature whistles are the most important items to discover, you'll also encounter magazines with different clothing styles that can be crafted in exchange for the wool that your sheep generate.

Like the creature finding process, finding bushes relies on being observant and looking for anything green and circular that has grass growing out of it. Students can help you locate these bushes, so you aren't completely helpless. The presence of the bushes also means that you'll need to find more sheep stuck in the world to ensure that the bewl-finding process goes faster. One thing that makes bush hunting enjoyable is that you don't have to babysit the sheep while they eat the grass, so you can do some light multitasking before a bewl is found.

The final distinct part of the game is the creature flocking. It only becomes necessary to do this in certain parts of the story, but you can try to charm any creature once you find their appropriate whistle, so you can start singing to them. The singing mechanic is straightforward, as you have to move in close or move back to get the icons to line up. Then you hit a button to sing the song and fill up a meter for that creature to decide to join your flock. You have a limited amount of time to get the meter filled once you start the singing process, but failure means that they'll get scared away for a little while before appearing again for another attempt.

For the most part, creature flocking is an optional task but it's also something you'll do anyway just to have loads of various creatures follow you at every step of the journey. You can uncover some baubles to grow the number of members in your flock, and some of the creatures that have been there the longest will leave once you exceed the cap. However, you can easily call them back to rejoin the group. The good news is that the sheep never count against that flock size, so you don't have to balance out your sheep versus other creatures for your flock total. That helps to keep the game experience relaxing.

The game premise is done well, and the world is a joy to explore because of it, but the concept is helped out by a number of other things done to ease some possible friction points for players of all types. The act of flying is done by moving in the direction you want, with the game automatically handling collision and elevation. There's an option for making the creature calls visible if they're coming from the ground or other somewhat hidden spots, and there's also an option to make the taming of creatures easier if you can't come to grips with the default system.

One of the more impressive things is how Flock handles areas that you can't go. Sometimes the game simply makes your bird circle back to the playable area, but other times, the game lets you zoom through the clouds and takes you to some safe ground by having you double back or by cutting through the impassable area into another playable area. For the latter, it feels like a good way to erase the idea of invisible borders; you're simply traveling at top speed, and the lack of an on-screen map reinforces the illusion that you aren't confined to a single area. It's something we've seen in a few other games in the past, and it is nice to see that technique applied here.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the presence of co-op. It isn't available as local co-op, which is a shame, but you can start an online session or join one in progress. For the most part, you're simply playing the campaign with a friend. It means that quests can be completed faster, but the real appeal is to simply fly around the world and show off how numerous and diverse your flock can be. It's a neat thing to have, but you aren't missing out on anything big if you choose to play the game solo.

There are a few quirks that mar the experience a little bit. If you're using a controller, the button prompt for leaving a perch is different than the button you use to take flight again. When observing some creatures, the camera sometimes does a bad job of placing them in focus. For one creature, that meant the camera was aiming below them, so you couldn't see them on-screen. The game also has you wait for the sheep to physically rejoin the flock before they can be shorn. You figure that out after you realize that the prompt from your uncle to shear a sheep appears before you can actually do so. These things don't break the game, but they are annoyances when you do encounter them.

Graphically, the game is simple yet beautiful. The beings will remind you of a mix of Bugsnax and Art Sqool. The creature designs are simple, the eyes are big, and the people look like multicolored puppets, but they all blend together to create something that looks adorable. The environments carry that same vibe as well as everything looks colorful and very detailed — but without relying on bright colors. About the only complaint is the presence of pop-in, which isn't so noticeable for environmental objects so much as creatures whose details don't appear until you zoom in and see the colors fill in.

The sound can be described as minimalist but effective. The music is often calming, and it only ramps up when you fly over cloud cover to convey how quickly you're moving. Most of the time, the soundtrack tones down to ensure that the various creature calls are heard clearly. Those sounds are all distinct, so you'll hear a few different ones from the same creature types. This really shines on a surround system, but it works very well on basic stereo as well.

Steam Deck users will find that the game works fairly well on Valve's device. The resolution defaults to the screen's native 1280x800 and starts with a mix of medium and low settings for its graphical options. Those options are all on sliders, so the actual settings may vary since there's no preset at the beginning. You'll also want to change the size of the text because it can get pretty small during gameplay. For the most part, the game runs at 60fps with only some slight dips when more elements are introduced on-screen, but that dip lasts for a second before the game tries to lock itself to 60fps again. On a full charge, you're getting a little less than two hours of game time on the Steam Deck LCD version, so you'll want to dial in the settings to squeeze more time if you can. You'll also be disappointed to learn that despite the Steam Client stating that cloud saving is supported, the build we had for review didn't seem to have that working. Be prepared to start two different saves on two different machines until that functions.

Flock is a cozy game that's done well. The simple act of chronicling creatures is both exciting and relaxing, and the same goes for you flying around without worrying about mastering what could've been a complicated control scheme. The objectives are breezy but challenging, and the game looks rather neat all around. It's different enough from other cozy titles that fans of the subgenre would do well to give Flock a shot.

Score: 8.5/10