I don’t know why, but I tend to gravitate toward sad stories in virtually all forms of media. My favorite shows are The Leftovers and Six Feet Under. My favorite book is Station Eleven. Some of my favorite songs are especially dour, like Circa Survive’s Spirit of the Stairwell. My favorite games often exhibit this preference, too, with games like Rime, Spiritfarer, and Before Your Eyes representing some of my all-time favorites. It’s been this way for me for as long as I can remember. I can’t explain it, but I can certainly recognize it. For this reason, I’m very excited for Herdling.
The Swiss studio at Okomotive previously made indie darlings Far: Lone Sails and its sequel, Far: Changing Tides tell a connected story about characters navigating a mysterious world on a makeshift boat. This next game from the team shares some traits; Herdling seems like it’ll also be presented without any spoken words, and some of the autumnal, earthy colors of Far carry over to Herdling, too. It also drops you into a world with little context, asking you to piece it together as the story unfolds. But the Far games, as best I understood them anyway, were merely dreary. Herdling seems like it will be heartbreaking, and I’m ready to hurt.
Herdling’s central mechanic sees you guiding a group of mammoth-like animals to what is presumably their natural habitat. How they’ve become displaced and separated in lands that sometimes resemble something more like cities than the wilderness they seem to seek is a big burning question early on, but like thatgamecompany’s Journey, it seems this answer will be slowly revealed over the course of the game, and probably not fully understood until its final moments.
The demo I played quickly got me acquainted with the controls. The animals, called calicorns, will follow your directions, though understanding how to guide them correctly is a deliberate learning process. Standing behind them, I could gently steer them toward where I wanted them to go, whether through a narrow alleyway, across a vast plain void of UI markers, or toward their stuck companion–whom I would rescue by solving environmental puzzles with the calicorns’ help.
Despite the game offering no spoken words or on-screen guidance, I found my destination, both short- and long-term, was reliably clear. The world had a way of revealing the way forward thanks to intuitive level design that subtly nudged me down the right path. As I pressed on, I added more members to the herd. My time with the game began with a solitary calicorn and ended with a half-dozen of them, and it seems the herd can grow well beyond that size, too.
These are all some of the game’s early highlights I enjoyed from my time with it, but they don’t speak to why I expect the game to emotionally destroy me. For that, you have to look toward the calicorns themselves. At first, it’s in how they’ve been brought to life. Their eyes look so sad to me. It was interesting to hear game designer, programmer, and sound designer Fabio Baumgartner tell me that the intent is to depict them with a “mix of different emotions.” “We try to give each animal a personality,” Baumgartner said. “So the big one is a bit older and sad, and the smaller ones are more childlike, more happy. Then there are others, they’re like the grandparents [who are] tired of life, so we try to give them different personalities.”
Admittedly, by the time I asked about the animals’ sad eyes, I may have been projecting my feelings onto them. I did see examples of what Baumgartner spoke to. The smaller calicorns I’d rescued had a playful way of moving and jumping; they were puppy-like, despite even the young ones being pretty large relative to my character. But I think I saw so much sadness in each of them because I was actively worried about losing them.
My demo ended with me and the herd traveling toward a train crossing. I didn’t play what I expect will be a puzzle to get them across safely, and being this is likely the game’s first example of a life-or-death puzzle, I expect it may even be pretty easy to get the entire herd across, as it teaches me some new mechanic to be mindful of. But merely the suggestion of this story moment filled me with a newfound existential fear regarding the calicorns. There I was, gathering them like a shepherd in some fantastical world, promising them a road trip toward refuge, but that makes me responsible for them. What if I mess it up?
What if I cause some of them to hurt–fall off a cliff, or get plucked away by some giant, fierce birdlike animal or, yeah, get run over by a train? Pure intentions are commendable, but they don’t guarantee safe passage. I realized as I took on these beings, each of them putting their trust in me to care for them and their kin, that we were signing up to share future hardship.
This might seem overstated, but in my philosophy-obsessed mind, it reminded me of being a parent in the world and how we may bring so much goodness into the lives of our kids–and they bring so much of the same into ours as parents–but we also must grapple with the fact that we are introducing them, to varying degrees for each child, to things like climate change, rampant gun violence, and widening wealth gaps. How much hardship do we create just by having kids at all? How much good must we then produce to balance the scales, or even better, come out as a net positive? This blatant responsibility falls to me, both in reality with my kids and in Herdling, which I can’t unsee as a microcosm of this predicament.
Naturally, I asked Okomotive if it’s possible to beat the game without losing any calicorns. “If you maybe played the game before, and you’re really experienced, it’s absolutely possible,” game director and co-founder Don Schmocker told me, “So it’s really in the player’s hands. You really have agency over how your herd is doing in general[…] This feeling of responsibility, it’s very important.” To be honest, that’s what I was afraid of.
I’m not ready to lose any calicorns. The elders of the herd are world-weary. The young ones are wide-eyed and innocent. Whatever their demeanor, I’ve asked them to follow me, and they’ve done so, believing I can help them, like taking an animal out of a shelter and giving them a loving home. To me, they all deserve the comfort and safety they seem determined to find, and it’s my responsibility to ensure they find it. But damn, if–or more likely when–I fail, it’s gonna hurt like hell.
Herdling arrives this summer on PC, Xbox, and PS5.