REVIEW: Lead the herd and develop bonds in Herdling

When we first brought VGG mascot and love of my life Phyllis home from the shelter, something changed. I'd taken care of family pets in the past but Phyllis was the first dog that I was properly accountable for. So when she got away from me on Day 1 and I had to chase her down in the streets to ensure she got home safe, the responsibility was made clear as day.

I spent the next few weeks hovering directly over her, worrying about every strange tick or quirk, marveling at every human-like trait she exhibited, and generally spending all my time thinking about what she was up to and if she was okay. And it's that same kind of worry I experienced all throughout Okomotive's animal herding adventure game.

Herdling may have you taking care of a creature that our world couldn't even fathom, but the feelings it provokes in you are all too relatable for anyone who's cared for an animal before: something that a rare few games accomplish.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Okomotive

Publisher: Panic

​Platform(s): PC*, PS5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed

​Price: $24.99

Release Date: August 21, 2025

Review key provided by publisher via popagenda.

Okomotive brings us Herdling from Switzerland. The indie studio was founded in 2017 and is most known for its releases in the FAR series. FAR: Lone Sails and FAR: Changing Tides were renowned for their silent stories, contextual puzzles, and stunning dystopian visuals. Herdling provides much of the same, but with an incredibly different play experience, ditching the side-scrolling fare of those games for a third-person herding adventure.

In Herdling, you're a young child waking up in a desolate city that's seen better days. You, however, may never have seen a good day. With a hoodie pulled tight and a ratty mattress in an underpass for a bed, you stir from your slumber because a car alarm is blaring somewhere nearby. Stumbling into an abandoned parking lot, littered with trash and the flipped-over car that roused you, you find a strange horned beast with its face stuck in a trash can, struggling to get free.

The beast is furry and feathered at the same time. It looks like one round ball of fur, but limbs from within push through and form against its skin. Two curly horns protrude horizontally out from either side of giant expressive red eyes. It stands tall, considering you with caution as you approach with a stick that it knocked down from a tree, aiming to pull that trash can off. It hums as you pet its face and calms down. This is a calicorn, and you immediately want to protect it with your life.

From within the city, you gather up a few more calicorns, each facing their own distressing situations, and suddenly find yourself at the head of a herd. When your newfound family stares longingly at a mural depicting creatures just like them grazing in the snowy mountains, a goal is set. Get these fuzzy friends to the mountains. Whatever it takes.

There's no dialog. There are no documents to pick up or audio logs to listen to that explain why the world seems to be in tatters, why ancient statues are torn asunder in the hills, or why these calicorns are left scattered across this world. Okomotive leans into their environmental storytelling experience to leave you to fill in the blanks. The only form of communication you really have are the cries and physical reactions of your herd when you clean brambles from their fur, pet them to help them calm down, or offer them some decorative jewelry that past shepherds have left behind.

When I first offered a calicorn a painted pinecone earring and it responded by rolling its head in a circle with joy, I was charmed. When I was surrounded by wagging tail feathers, head rolling dances, and the bounces of smaller calicorns, I was in love. The artists and animators at Okomotive truly outdid themselves in creating these enchanting creatures.

The story is one of survival, collaboration, and family. Okomotive balances your emotions beautifully, giving you tense moments of fear as you face the perilous natural obstacles on your journey to bring these creatures home — but then offering heart-soaring moments of joy in equal measure. When the stellar orchestrated soundtrack from composer Joel Schoch swells as you embark and take your herd from the tight cramped quarters of the city and into the wide open fields, I couldn't help but break out into a giant smile.

Herdling thrives with that balance, taking you up and down the emotional rollercoaster as you go on this journey. It's a simple and straightforward narrative, but a satisfying one, emphasizing the connection between humans and animals beautifully as both go on an adventure that changes the both of them.

So how does Okomotive translate that into a satisfying game? It's simple: by making the calicorns a little dumb.

These creatures can only make it through the world with your help. As a newly appointed shepherd, you'll utilize that same stick you used to free your first calicorn friend from their trash can foe to summon a magical flowery force that your calicorns are attracted to. From behind the pack, you'll summon flowers ahead and the calicorns will walk toward it. To get them to walk left, you'll have to trail off to the right. To them to walk right, trail off left. So on and so forth.

It creates this lightly clunky, probably purposefully so, experience where you fiddle with direction from behind the pack to navigate them through tricky terrain and guide them to safety. You can get them to slow down or stop at any point — necessary toward the end of the game when taking one step in the wrong direction could spell danger for your herd. But most of your adventure is just about getting your pack moving toward their next goal. Sometimes it's a field of flowers that'll magically imbue your herd with the power to unlock some ancient door or dash forward with incredible speed to blow through an open field. Sometimes it's a delicate field of stone cairns that you try not to disturb, so as to not awake the ancient predator that nests ahead. But it's all about the herd and shuffling them forward.

For the most part, it's an intuitive system that the game's opening area perfectly teaches you before unleashing you on this adventure. But there were definite moments of frustration when the pack doesn't do exactly what you'd like them to in any given moment, amplified by the stress of the game's more dangerous moments. Calicorns will regularly break off from the pack with no easy way to push them back into the herd. There's no way to influence the shape of the herd, so one tiny calicorn step out of line could push someone into danger despite your best efforts.

It should be noted that there are opportunities to lose your calicorns to the dangers of the wilds. If you take your time and are patient with your herd, it isn't too hard to avoid these dangers. But you can lose calicorns if you aren't careful. I know some people can't handle that kind of emotional trauma, so those who need DoesTheDogDie to make it through a movie, keep an eye out.

I wanted to be more mad at these moments when they'd break off, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized those feelings weren't that dissimilar to the frustrations I have with my own little creature at home, Phyllis, who frequently doesn't follow my commands exactly the way I want her to. And what better demonstration of animal behavior could Okomotive show me to prove they're doing something special with this game? (Okay... it's still a little annoying and probably isn't entirely a purposeful design choice, but it's a clever way to reframe a few buggy behaviors from time to time.)

And that brings me to the biggest observation I had while playing through Herdling, how animal behavior factors into everything you do. The game tries to give each calicorn its own personality, resulting in small but meaningful changes in how each member of your herd behaves. In my pack, I got a small white calicorn early on that I named Mello — like a marshmallow — and I noticed it had a tag of "rascal" on my herd screen in the menu. I wondered what that meant, not having noticed much of an issue before this, but shrugged it off and went on my adventure.

After trudging through another big open field, I noticed Mello was a bit dirty. Tangled in brambles. I thought "oh neat, they can get a little messed up when you run through bushes." But then, not even a few minutes later, Mello was dirty again. And again. And again. This rascal was going out of its way to make a mess and I was having to clean it up. Then I noticed Bigna, one of the calicorns with the "affectionate" tag in my herd, was always wanting extra pets when we stopped at one of the game's rest points. And I noticed Lone, my "brave" calicorn, starting to take the lead in the pack after they joined up with us toward the end of the game.

It's a small thing, one that doesn't drastically change the core gameplay systems, but it does make your relationship with these beasts fuller. More enjoyable. By the end of my time, I understood each one of them in different ways. The sleepier Grampy, so named for their grandpa aesthetic, the rowdy Beri who wanted to play catch whenever we took a break, the loner Maxime who put themself to sleep almost immediately at every campfire. It gives the calicorns life and makes them more than some Lemmings to guide safely and more like my Phyllis: actual companions.

The one note I have is that Herdling is a game best played in as few sittings as possible. I ended up having to play this game in smaller segments and found it a much more stilted and less impactful experience as a result. Sitting between 4–6 hours of full playtime, I lamented the fact that I didn't just clear a day for it and experience the rollercoaster journey in one go. It's best suited for that, or at most two sessions, to get the full impact of the experience.

Playing the way I did left me feeling like some segments ended up a little same-y, particularly with how often the game tosses you into a field and just asks you to run. In one sitting, it might just blur together and not stand out as much. Across multiple smaller sessions, I saw the stitches a bit more clearly.

Herdling is an emotional journey about the bond between living beings, offering players the opportunity to develop actual connections to the charming calicorns in a silent adventure all about working together to succeed. It proportionally delivers heart-pounding stress and soaring happiness by making you fall in love with its fictional creatures.

Calicorns are cute, video games are good, and Herdling is a journey that I could never regret embarking on.

Video Games Are Good and Herdling is . . . GREAT. (8/10)

+ perfectly tuned emotional rollercoaster, purposefully clunky control system feels intuitive and accessible, calicorns feel like living breathing beings

- best experienced in one sitting, a little frustrating to wrangle the herd at times, can get a little same-y near the middle of the game

Thanks for reading this Video Games Are Good review. Learn more about our review rubric — and if you'd like to discuss reviews and get early views at upcoming articles, join our Discord. We're proud to continue bringing human voices and thoughts to the video game journalism and media landscape. Thank you for supporting our coverage!