“Herdling” Review: Found Family in a Fragile World

If you are looking for a gentle soul-salve this weekend then Herdling might just be the game for you.

This new third-person adventure from developers Okomotive puts you in the shoes of a young homeless boy whose encounters with a herd of lovable shaggy creatures called Calicorns send him on a grand adventure, both without and within.

Herdling begins in the backstreets of a city that seen better days. In fact, Okomotive has imbued the whole world of Herdling with an impression of decay. There aren’t enough people to populate it. Buildings stand mostly empty. Farms are untended. Industry has ground to a halt. The wilderness encroaches on the city. A passing car or light appearing in a window only adds to a sense of loneliness and disconnection.

Our hero awakens from his slumber on a stack of flattened cardboard boxes after a hearing a noise in the alley nearby. Upon investigation he discovers an enormous shaggy creature with its head stuck in a bucket careening about and knocking over abandoned cars in its panic to be free. This is a Calicorn, and the first of many you will encounter on your journey. (Think of a cross between a Yak, a bear, and a dog, with a walking animation style resembling an old man in an oversized coat, and the personality of a Labrador.) The boy frees the Calicorn, and decides to guide it back to the safety of the wilderness outside the city.

However as they set out, the pair soon discover other Calicorns of various shapes and sizes and personalities in similar need of assistance. Some are stuck, others injured, or lost, or hungry. Some are playful. Some are brave. Some are affectionate, while others are happy rogues. Soon the abandoned boy and the ever growing number of similarly abandoned creatures form a tight herd. Under the boy’s direction, they set out to find a safer place to live.

Herdling is essentially a shepherding game with the mechanics involving encountering new Calicorns in need of rescue as you travel. First you must assist the creature in need. Most often they’ll need to be rescued from whatever mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Then you’ll need to tame your new herd member (a few pats on the head should do the trick.)

Calicorns who are injured will need to be fed special flowers (more on those in a minute) to be made well again, or run the risk of slowing down the entire herd with their heartbreaking limping. You can give your Calicorns names, or allow the game to choose them for you. As you get to know your herd, you’ll discover their hidden personalities too.

The boy controls the herd by standing behind them, and using a special Shepherd’s stick to guide and direct his furry charges. Your position in the rear becomes the fulcrum around which your herding ‘lever’ acts, driving the herd to the right or the left or straight ahead at your command.

It takes some adjusting to play as a character at the bottom of the screen, with all of the game’s action happening ahead of you. In the early stages I had to remind myself continually not to race forward and outpace the herd — who tend to scatter and do silly things when not directed carefully.

You can also issue commands to slow down, speed up (via the stampede action), and stop. The herding stick also sprouts a flower for each new Calicorn you add to your herd. These flowers don’t actually grant any new abilities but they’re a nice little visual treat in themselves.

As you leave the city behind and strike out into the wilderness, you’ll encounter a series of differently colored flowers in the meadows, alpine paths, foothills, and forests you traverse.

Eating blue flowers will ‘charge’ the herd with vigor and vitality, while red ones will help them run faster — initiating a rampage that can assist the herd when the terrain is slippery or dangerous, or even just for the thrill of it.

Yellow flowers meanwhile play into the mysticism of the game, revealing a series of murals to the boy that hint at his destiny, his deeper and more profound relationship to the herd, and the promise of a paradise beyond the horizon.

Meanwhile, making camp in the evening is a great way to bond with your animals around the fire, and to receive dream-like visions that hint at where you should travel next.

Herdling is a gentle game, and its obstacles are also of the gentle variety. On your journey to the great unknown you will encounter simple puzzles that will need to be overcome to free a trapped Calicorn, or to navigate to an inaccessible area to raise a bridge or platform etc.

Certain terrain is smooth or icy, necessitating a charged up stampede to traverse quickly or else run the risk of watching your flock sliding down the mountainside. You can even lose a Calicorn over the edge of a cliff or to an icy sinkhole if you are slow about rescuing your herd from danger.

There are monstrous crow-like birds that will swoop and attack your herd if you damage their nesting grounds. On occasion the game even creates its own unintended obstacles via a fiddly herding control system that I somehow never quite managed to master, even in the game’s final moments. I lost track of the number of times I sent my herd crashing into the scenery instead of stampeding joyfully down the center of a flower-strewn meadow.

2025 is truly a year of innovation from smaller gaming studios with big imaginations. Games like Blue Prince, The Alters, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and others prove you don’t have to be a AAA studio to produce stunning, original and memorable games that linger in players’ imaginations. Okomotive has also tried something brave and new with Herdling: a wordless story about trust, found family, and companionship. The studio deserves credit for originality and heart, a rousing orchestral score, and beautiful environments.

However, the game’s tricky herding mechanics, coupled with environmental puzzles and threats that feel a little too light, subtract from the rush of emotion the game wants us to feel. And while the Calicorns are charmingly designed creatures, we never really get to bond with them in a more meaningful way other than to adorn their horns with in-game collectibles, and read their personality types in the Herd menu. (You can also occasionally stand on one to reach a high ledge.)

Over the short course of the game (I finished it over 2 moderate game play sessions), I never felt the same giddy highs or sob-choked lows as in Japan Studio’s 2016 title The Last Guardian — a similar tale of survival and companionship between a lost boy and a fantastical creature traversing a broken world together. Instead, Herdling seems to suffer from the same inconstancies as 2024’s Harold Halibut, another beautiful and thoroughly original game concept that just felt a little too gentle to linger long in the imagination.

Genre: Action Adventure. Platforms: PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series X/S (and Game Pass), Nintendo Switch. Studio: Okomotive. Publisher: Panic. Release Date: 08/21/2025.