Not to be a downer, but I am tired of friendslop games. The friendslop formula, known for things like comical co-op gameplay and proximity chat, has been diluted by an onslaught of too many games since the release of PEAK, and it seems like every single weekend I’m begged to buy a $5 game with a very corny gimmick that my friends and I will play for maybe two hours before it rots in our Steam libraries forever.
A lot of these recent games have felt meaningless to me, which I guess is the point sometimes—it is called friendslop, after all. But I’m delighted to announce that I’m hooked on a new co-op game that has the potential to stick around for a while, and that’s because it’s so faithful to a very enjoyable hobby.
Flock Around, which was released by Secret Plan in late April, is an open world co-op game about birding. There are 65 birds in the game, and your goal is to locate them, capture close-up photos of each species from four different angles, and find each bird’s shiny variant, whether you’re teaming up with friends or taking on the challenge alone.
Despite its slightly janky UI and reliance on a tired character creation trope that I’m dubbing the Friendslop Physiognomy (blobby, colorful characters with goofy faces), Flock Around is surprisingly fleshed out. There are different biomes to unlock, seeds to lure different birds in with, and a handful of binocular and camera upgrades that make birding easier. The best part of all of this, though, is that the birds move around like their real-life counterparts, inhabit the same biomes, and even make accurate calls.
I’m so thrilled by all of this because I’m a huge birder. Contrary to how this might make me sound, I’m not an 80-year-old man sporting a vest and a sunhat. I’m a twenty-something freak who got really into birding about a year ago because (hear me out) birding is like gaming, something akin to a real-life version of Pokémon GO. The second I found out that a lot of birders keep a “life list,” or a list of all the birds they’ve seen in their lives, and that new additions are called “lifers,” I was hooked. A little over a year later, I’ve now seen 167 different species.
Birding in solitude is neat. You can do it in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which was the first game to scratch that digital birding itch for me. But birding with friends is when things get really, really fun, and Flock Around is the first game to recreate that thrill. My friends and I have had a lot of fun with this game—trying to find each other before placing seeds, tormenting each other with shrill whistles, and blaming each other when we scare away a bird. My favorite, though, is when a non-birder friend excitedly yells out the location of a bird: “Rufous Hummingbird!!!! RUFOUS HUMMINGBIRD!!!!!”
Flock Around is being funded in part by Outersloth, so I hope the devs keep updating it for a long time. This game has some serious legs (wings?), largely thanks to the hobby it’s so faithful to. That fidelity is also what just might give Flock Around the potential to introduce its digital birders to the real-life version of this hobby.
Basically, if you like birding, try Flock Around. If you like Flock Around, download the app Merlin Bird ID, go for a walk, and try identifying some birds. (And if you’re Secret Plan Games, please add wood ducks! Please!)
