Herdling

Developer Okomotive

Publisher Panic

Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch, Xbox Series

Release Out now

Much like Fumito Ueda, for its third major release Okomotive has wilfully ignored the old adage about working with children and animals. Indeed, Herdling’s opening initially comes off as an urban twist on The Last Guardian: our first objective involves taming a strange-looking creature that combines elements of real-world animals (in this case, yak-like ungulates) with a dash of the fantastical. The stone floor of a jail cell has been replaced by a mattress beneath a noisy overpass, while our young protagonist’s first encounter with the large beast that will be with them for the rest of their journey involves prying a bucket from their nose with a stick instead of plucking arrows from its flank. Taming this fellow is rather more straightforward, too: simply hold the topmost face button down for a few seconds to bring the calicorn under your command. In truth, this is probably for the best, since your job, as the title suggests, isn’t to guide just one of these creatures through the world, but several.

This city-set tutorial has its moments – such as when a more timid calicorn cowers beyond the influence of your now-magical guiding stick, requiring the reassuring presence of his kin to be coaxed out of hiding – but otherwise gets Herdling off to a slightly shaky start. It’s a little too obviously a tutorial, combining conspicuous environmental highlights and instructional text to the point where it feels like you are the one being shepherded. That’s a problem that never entirely dissipates (when we’re later faced with a circular pit with bundles of firewood nearby marked in bright blue, we needn’t be told to “find two pieces of wood to light a fire”), yet it doesn’t rankle quite as much as you’d expect. Advancing down a narrow street towards a warm, inviting light, what greets us at the end makes us reconsider some of those clunky constraints.