Herdling (2025)

Developer: Okomotive

Back in 2020, I reviewed FAR: Lone Sails, a 2018 game by Okomotive that gained a high spot on my list of reviewed games. It stuck with me and I was quick to pick up and review the follow-up FAR: Changing Tides in 2022. Although I’ve played plenty games in the last few months that are worth reviewing, I thought it made sense to come back to my roots with a third review of an Okomotive game. Herdling is an atmospheric adventure game where you are a young shepherd to a herd of large creatures called calicorns. Herdling is compelling in the way that you bond with and protect your calicorns while journeying through a vast world, but it loses some impact when it fails to make the herding gameplay smooth and consistently interesting.

You awaken at the start of the game as a young boy, alone in an abandoned-looking city and apparently living on the streets. You follow a sound of a car alarm going off, which leads you to encounter your first calicorn. It’s a surprisingly large animal that looks like a big fluffy ox or buffalo with a flat face and big eyes. Although it’s scared and panicked at first, you manage to remove a metal bucket stuck on its face and calm it down. From here on, you lead the friendly calicorn by walking behind it with a stick and pointing where it should go. You soon meet and rescue more calicorns along the way who join your herd, joining you on your journey out of the city and into the wilderness. The world outside the city is dangerous, with terrifying bird creatures and collapsing terrain, so you’ll need to work together with your herd to get through obstacles and avoid harm.

It's a gut punch to start the game and see such sad conditions for your main character, who lives under this bridge but has still made it home-y as best they can.

The FAR games distinguish themselves strongly by their beautiful, watercolor-like, almost melancholy environmental art, especially showing desolate and vast worlds that make you feel small. I expected the same would still apply when veering from side-scrolling puzzling into a third-person adventure. For the most part, the worlds they built still give you that grand feeling and I enjoyed the variety of ecosystems you travel through. However, I do feel a bit underwhelmed about the graphics when it comes to more up-close details. The calicorns look really odd at times, almost like parts of their body clip into others. Also, the bushes and rivers you walk by look incredibly flat at times. The lack of clarity can also make it difficult to tell if it’s an area you can traverse or a physical obstacle. Unfortunately, I didn’t come away feeling the same admiration for its art style as I did for the previous games. The soundtrack definitely stands out and can be listened to on its own, it feels both peaceful and playful, evoking that feeling of being on a great journey.

The mountains glowing under a cloudy sunset is an incredibly beautiful view. Meanwhile, the up-close image of bushes next to a river feels choppy and static.

It takes, in my opinion, too long to master the strange controls of this game. Moving your herd requires you to always be behind them, which I get, but it also requires you to be the correct distance and diagonal angle behind them. There’s a small cursor that shows what direction you’re pointing them towards, but it’s very small and often blends into the background. If there’s a narrow path, it’s difficult to get behind the calicorns in a way that will allow you to lead them in the correct direction. When encountering dangerous obstacles, I spent a lot of time having my herd go, then stop, then go again, repeatedly, which just wasn’t fun to do. It was the only way to be careful since the movement felt unpredictable. Going around multiple curves is especially difficult, since some of your calicorns spread out a lot further than others when in a herd. This is how I tragically lost one of my calicorns – the calicorn closest to the outer edge of the group took repeated hits from obstacles even though I tried my best to navigate carefully them. As someone who has a warm spot in their heart for The Last Guardian, I can partially forgive when animal companions don’t “behave” exactly as you want them to, but with serious consequences to making a mistake I wish there would have been a way to make your herd make a tighter “group” when in tight spots. I would have enjoyed if there had been more creative puzzle-solving challenges involving the calicorns, like when they help boost you to be able to access a higher area. They did a little bit of this in the early game, but I wish it had been a more prominent part of progression like it is in FAR: Lone Sails. However, something that felt thematically consistent was the challenge of having a complex “system” to operate and handle while also traversing forward in the world. The most fun aspect of the herd mechanics is when you get to charge up and release your herd on a stampede, where they run faster and trample through any tall plants in their way. In most cases you don’t have to worry about directing them for that short span of time.

Ferrying my calicorns across the water on an old boat, which they helped me climb onto, was one of my favorite parts of the game.

Herdling is a quiet adventure with no dialogue and no details about the characters, which is familiar if you’ve played any of the FAR games. It felt novel however, in its focus on connecting and growing fond of these great, loveable beasts over a couple of hours. You can not only pet the calicorns, but also feed them (which heals their damage), play with them, decorate their horns, and have them help you out. You work together with them, rescuing them and protecting them while they do the same for you. They all look a little different from one another and they serve different roles within the group. There were assigned “personality types” to each of them that unlocked as you fed them and got to know them better. I found this a bit confusing, as I tried to go out of my way to feed them all, but some never got assigned personality types. The big calicorns are often brave and will push forward, while the little ones will come and give you a boost when you need to get up somewhere. Some were labelled ‘rascal’ which was funny but I wasn’t clear on what that meant in action. Losing one of my herd was genuinely so sad that I considered quitting my game before autosave to undo the loss, but I decided not to in order to experience it authentically. I think this was a good decision because although the loss made me very sad, it made me feel more protective of my herd and impacted some of the game’s progression in an interesting way.

This game is surprisingly gruesome - it hurt my heart seeing so many of my calicorns injured after traversing a difficult section.

Herdling had me unconvinced at the beginning but I warmed up to it as the game went on. That all culminated in what I thought was a great ending, which I found not only emotionally powerful but also a high point from a gameplay perspective. I only wish that type of energy had been applied at other parts of the game, so that it could’ve felt more fun and freeing rather than tedious and counterintuitive. Herdling is flawed for sure, but it nails the vibes and atmosphere of a monumental adventure through wilderness, where you grow together and survive nature alongside your silly, loving little (big) guys.

Herdling is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch

Played on: Xbox Series S

Finished: 11/30/2025

Playtime: 5.5 hrs