Flock is an enchanting game — ostensibly, a sort of fantasy birding wish fulfillment. No binoculars, no bug spray, no waking up at 5:00AM for the slimmest of chances at a glimpse of a migratory duck. In Flock, you yourself soar through the air on the back of your feathery steed, trailed by the cool and colorful little beasties you’ve charmed with your magnetic aura. There’s a small open world packed tight with some classic birdy biomes: a flower field, a wetland, an autumnal forest, a mossy glade, and sprawling grasslands. All of this is great, as is the brief narrative setup, but Flock falls short in the space of details.

Before I move on, I’ll quickly address that I played Flock wholly singleplayer, contrary to what the game’s promotion suggests. Some of the first words in its store description are “multiplayer co-op,” so that’s sure to be the first thing a potential purchaser sees. And I’m not totally sure why! Everything’s better with friends and all that, but I don’t see Flock as a multiplayer game, nor one with a strong cooperative component. Like much of Flock, I’d describe the feature as “nice.” I’m not sure why co-op featured so heavily in the game’s marketing.

Anyhow, the game’s setup is that your Aunt Jane, a professional zoologist, needs help gathering more information on local bird species. As a Birdrider, you’re the perfect choice, able to fly all across and up and down the area with speed and ease; and, as you find out, your bird can mimic other bird calls, allowing you to charm wild fowl. There’s your aunt’s twin, Uncle Reg, a shepherd who’ll teach you how to care for some flying sheep-sausages and collect their wool for knitting; and there’s Nadiya, a textile artist who can turn that wool (and collectible knitting patterns) into clothing for you. That’s it for characters, aside from Aunt Jane’s interns, who’re little more than wool-farming quest stations. A smattering of environments, NPCs you can count on your hands, and a grand total of 60 birds to log.

Perfect. I love Flock as a tight, focused experience spent less than a weekend enjoying. But there’s a dragging out of that length, mostly in the form of more-than-occasional roteness. While I appreciate the attempt, Flock feels narratively overdesigned — not that its writing is terrible or overbearing, but because what is there gets in the way of the streamlined experience it shines as. In a peaceful, co-op capable birding game with a big checklist of creatures, the collectathon is the game, the motivation to play the game, and the reward itself. But Flock’s campaign keeps the player from the full open world — and thus, all the birds — for around two of its five main story hours. The world is only unlocked by meeting hidden list totals. Logging x amount of new species triggers a short quest, which, upon completion, opens at least one new biome. This presents some complications when it comes to game flow, as the birds behave as you’d expect (however gamified they may be), only appearing in certain biomes at certain times of day. And, some are rarer and won’t show up as often or require more involved methods to find. Early on and very late in the game, there’s a lot of time spent waiting, sitting or haphazardly zipping around, hoping for a new creature to appear and make progress possible again. It’s a beautiful moment when the cloud layer falls and the next biome is revealed, but I’m not sure it’s worth the tradeoff that this structure provides.

The issue of flow is further exacerbated by the bird book itself. It contains no descriptive information for any of the birds beyond which family they belong to, which is of minimal help when searching. You can choose to receive a hint for any species you’re missing, but this feels more like a last resort before turning to an online guide than the name “hint” would imply. They usually explain precisely where and how to find a specimen; far too much when all you want is initial information. The only way to view a basic visual or behavioral description is by finding another bird in the same family and attempting to identify it, which displays unique, short descriptions of all its family members. This information only appears on-screen during the identification process and can only be done once per species. During my first playthrough, I usually found birds by remembering these short entries instead of using the hints or speaking to any of the zoologists. In a game about filling out a logbook, there’s not much reason to even look at it. As much as I can appreciate that that might break the player’s immersion or unnecessarily tear them away from the world, it feels like something’s missing here.

The identification process itself is pretty obnoxious past the enchanting first handful of encounters. After identifying the bird with a lil hold-zoom, you wait as the log musically ticks up onto the screen, go through the exact same dialogue string for every entry (that’s 58 times), and then listen to the little jingle as it officially populates the list. This whole thing, menus included, doesn’t pause the game, so the bird you’re identifying may leave or escape before any attempt to tame it. This happened to me maybe a dozen times. It’s an unfittingly grating process for a short game about peacefully filling out a list.

I say that, but there are enough of these weird disconnects in Flock that I become less certain I know what exactly the game is. There’s the downright strange decision to roll credits not at 100% logbook completion, but after returning Aunt Jane’s bag of birdseed to her, stolen by the magpie-esque Burgling Bewls. It’s an understated conclusion to a questline that is itself understated to a fault. It feels neither like the final quest and narrative throughline for the entire story, nor pared back enough to serve as a simple, “save the princess”-esque impetus that lets the game happen and gets out of the way. So, straight back to the game, because there’s still a good 10-20 birds to find. Just as well, it’s odd that, in a game about birds, you can’t set up bird feeders until after the credits as a sort of postgame grinding bonus… Was I supposed to enter other people’s multiplayer games with my sunflower seeds in tow, like a high-level MMO player loitering around a difficult boss to help the sprouts?

Maybe the most incongruous piece of the game is in the titular flock. There’s no narrative or gameplay justification to gather the birds! There are two mainline quests to charm two very particular birds, but they’re hard story gates. There’s one other bit of the main story that requires you to charm and keep specific species within your flock, and there’s the slight bonus that one family — Winnows — are snitches who will point out other camouflaged Winnows, whether or not you’ve identified them before. Other than that, it’s all for your own personal enjoyment. And, y’know, that’s fun on its own! But crucially, each family requires a whistle to charm its members. Once the first 30 or so minutes of the game have passed, you’ll regularly encounter birds that you can’t charm, and may not be able to until nearing the credits. How interested are you in backtracking to previous areas and waiting around for a while for a spawn just to charm a bird you liked into your flock? There is one optional quest to gather a certain amount of males of one speciesso they’ll perform a mating dance and lure out the female. I really, really wish there was more stuff like this or the Winnows bonus which creates interaction between your flock and the game world. The game can feel so barebones at times; not quite liminal, but nonetheless like a nebulously gamified “third space” with no one to talk to and nothing to do.

The bones might be a bit bare but, well, they’re good bones. Flock is a pretty, pretty game with the same whimsical British spirit that Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg have instilled in all of their previous projects. The score by Eli Rainsberry is wonderful as always; subtle and ambient, serving mostly to punctuate moments of exploration as well as the change in the time of day. Overall, the audio design by Dan Pugsley may be the standout of the entire game. It’s great fun to wander around quietly with the breeze and occasional musical tones and have a new flurry of birdsong catch your ear. These moments — of having your current mission interrupted by a new call, a new search — are Flock at its best. Finding hidden birds like the Sunset Sprug or most any of the Winnows ranks as a close second. The soundscape is so immersive and enveloping, especially for something as obviously artificial as Flock with its wingless, eclair-shaped birds and neon pastel trees. I just wish it let me really live in that space! And I wish it gave me more to do. I enjoyed my time with it and would recommend it to anyone interested in its pitch as a cute, eccentric, and peaceful sort of creature collector, but it can be frustrating how often it takes a backseat to itself.