Finding yourself in a stampede is never a good thing. But leading one, it turns out, can be a lot of fun. Ahead of its release later this year, Inverse got a hands-on demo and a developer-led preview of Herdling, the next game from the studio behind Far: Lone Sails, which hands players the reins of a herd of migrating animals on a journey to the mountains.
Developer Okomotive’s Far: Lone Sails and its sequel, Changing Tides, are lonesome games, sending players on a journey with no one to accompany them but the boat they rely on to navigate the games’ waters. In Herdling, rather than having a vehicle to ride, you’re put in control of a herd of Calicorns, furry, four-legged creatures somewhere between Muppets and buffalo. It’s still a game about interdependence on a long journey, but here the relationship is reversed, with the Calicorns relying on you to guide them instead of you relying on your vessel.
Herdling starts, rather grimly, with a small child sleeping under a bridge in a dismal city. Awakened by sounds of thrashing, the child — your character — quickly finds a lost Calicorn with a bucket stuck on its head. Pulling it off and taming the Calicorn makes it the first of your herd, and the next few minutes are spent rounding up younger members of the herd stuck nearby.
As the child, you control the herd indirectly. Stand behind it and press the controller’s right trigger, and you’ll direct the Calicorns to move away from you. Other actions come a bit later, like ordering the herd to stop or slow down, but these are always a little more like suggestions than commands. The herd will do what you say, but not always immediately, and often with a little milling around in the process. Your own interaction with the world is mostly limited to pushing gates to allow the herd through, and you’ll need the help of your Calicorns to move any that are particularly heavy.
Once the herd is gathered, you leave the city, heading for a gigantic mountain in the distance that the Calicorns are drawn to. Here, the cramped, litter-strewn alleyways of the city give way to vast fields and forests. Unlike in the city, there’s more danger in the wilderness, and careful control of the herd becomes more important. The Calicorns can be harmed by walking through thorns, and while it’s not present in the demo that’s not available on Steam, a presentation to press showed the Calicorns running from a massive bird attacking from above. Later, there’s danger of falling from the crumbling passes that wind up the side of your eventual mountain destination.
Early on, though, the scrapes your Calicorns incur can easily be healed if you hand-feed them fruit found along the way. You can also pet them and clean brambles from their fur. Rather than focusing on the world’s danger, the early section of Herdling shown in the demo is all about the exhilaration of running free. Passing through patches of bright blue flowers “charges” the Calicorns, with one charge given for each animal in your herd. You can then spend one of these charges to send them into a stampede, giving them a boost of speed that lets them break through obstacles and cover a lot of ground quickly. You get a boost yourself, running as fast as your little legs will carry you behind the herd, almost as if you’re being towed along like a skier.
Chaining these stampedes together is an absolute rush, letting you dash across vast distances in seconds, carried along by the speed of your herd. Herdling’s first hour is more about producing this feeling than offering much challenge. The rush of running with a stampede is a joy on its own, but whether Herdling can deliver a satisfying cadence of trickier puzzle sections along with this liberating feeling will be the game’s test in the long run.
