Herdling review – like herding cats, without the cats

A new indie title joins a surprisingly long list of games that feature herding animals as its primary gameplay feature, but it’s a lot more fun than it sounds.

Herding animals is a surprisingly common mechanic in video games. In 2001, Lionhead’s Black & White had you collecting lost sheep, as did both Red Dead Redemptions, and quite a number of side quests in The Legend Of Zelda series. Some games, though, don’t just feature a bit of herding, but actually make it their main event. Annapurna’s delightful Flock was one, as was 2002’s Herdy Gerdy – so Herdling’s premise isn’t quite as unique as you might imagine.

Beginning the game huddled in a gloomy, rubbish strewn pedestrian underpass, your silent and nameless shepherd boy gets up, dusts himself off, and soon meets his very first calicorn. These are large, shaggy beasts with curled horns, a bit like a cross between a yak and a bantha. You can tame one with a long button press, give it a name, and proceed to guide it through the derelict remains of the city.

Coming across a couple of much smaller calicorns, that you add to your herd in the same way, you start to learn the techniques necessary for your new life as a herder. It’s straightforward, if a little clumsy in execution, and you’ll soon be guiding, slowing, stopping, and stampeding with simple combinations of the buttons, triggers, and analogue sticks.

Steering your woolly crew out past the city limits, you find yourself in the expansive wilderness beyond, heading for a distant range of mountains. While there are pockets of abandoned infrastructure – railways, bridges, crumbling outbuildings – there’s absolutely nobody else around, and initially the only other things you meet are just more shambling calicorns to add to your flock.

The game makes an excellent first impression, with its sense of wordless isolation instantly recalling Sony’s classic Ico. You may also be reminded of its spiritual successor, The Last Guardian, as you’re attempting to manoeuvre your herd. As in that game, events don’t always trigger easily, which you can put down either to control issues or the fact that you’re cajoling large, unwieldy beasts to do your bidding. In either case, keeping calm and continuing to fumble about in search of a solution is a winning formula.

Calicorns themselves are far from uniform and come in various colourations and sizes. Impressively, each one also seems to have its own character. Some will follow you, others like to wander off alone when not being specifically guided, while others like to stick next to bigger calicorns. Some are greedy, others parsimonious with their appetites, and the fact that each also has a name, that you give them, means you soon start to get to know individual members of your group.

You’ll also find yourself needing to clean the babies from time to time, feeding them glowing fruit from bushes you find along the way. You can also pet them, which prompts them to sit down and close their eyes in rapture. Some enjoy a game of fetch before you build a campfire and settle down for a night amongst your silently sleeping herd.

That adds significantly to the distress when you discover that calicorns are far from impervious to the perils of the world and can quickly and easily be killed. Although slipping off mountain paths is one way to go, a more common threat is being slaughtered by huge carnivorous birds, which swoop down if you make the mistake of knocking over any of the copses of tiny, ornamental trees you occasionally stumble across.

You need to take particular care moving past these, because even at the stately pace your herd instinctively adopts, the animals’ lumbering scale and slight waywardness make it challenging not to cause accidental mayhem, with carnage inevitably following. It’s at these times that the vagaries of the control system can feel irritating and unfair, rather than charmingly organic.

Still, each death is important, and while it’s marked without sentimentality, each loss is felt. Accidentally kill too many though, and you’ll be sent back to the last checkpoint to have another go. It means you can never lose your whole flock or let numbers dwindle so low that it no longer feels like herding.

It’s also worth mentioning the landscapes, whose sense of loneliness would be extreme without your furry companions. While the wide spaces look like a completely open world, progress is actually exactingly linear, the environment’s subtle visual cues gently steering you and your team in the right direction, even if it feels as though you’re randomly finding your way through nature.

In the odd moments where you do reach a dead end, mists close behind you, preventing you wandering off in the wrong direction and keeping you focused on the puzzles. These prove to be quite simple but it can take a bit of trial and error to get your charges in the right place to ‘activate’ huge, mysterious wall paintings that reveal the way forward.

While not as coherent or involving as Journey, which is the other obvious point of comparison for Herdling, it’s a similar length and, like Journey, despite its brevity, manages to make you feel as though you’ve been on an epic trek by the time the closing credits roll. The occasional moments of frustration are balanced by the beguiling and charming nature of your herd, and enveloping sense of mystery in Herdling’s abandoned world.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Panic
Developer: Okomotive
Release Date: 21st August 2025
Age Rating: 12

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