I started and, in a single session, completed Herdling by Okomotive games. It’s a dialogueless, experiential game that begins when your nameless, genderless, voiceless protagonist rescues a trapped beast in a gray, lifeless city. Something snaps, and they decide to abandon the grey concrete walls to make a pilgrimage with their newfound herd to a distant mountain peak. And so Herdling joins several similar “Journey” games, games light on overt plot that aspire to change you through travel, of which Journey is, shockingly, the most notable.

Music and sound are used minimally throughout Herdling, but to great effect. Usually muted, the game reserves a few times to roar and shake your bones with the force of the earth. Other times, the herd’s music lifts your heart, such as the first time you run across an open plain, the claustrophobic city walls gone, and an open horizon ahead. The music becomes the wind under your feet and the sun on your face.

The animals in your herd, a sort of goat / sheep / bison hybrid, each have their own personality traits. One, a small, spiral-horned one which I named Skelter, got its wool matted with leaves and branches if it so much as looked at a bush, while another had a dog-like love of chasing thrown balls. It’s these personalities that set each herd member apart, that gives them life, and that endears them to you. Sadly, it’s not enough.

Herdling is a 3-hour title, and by the end you’ll amass a group of ten almost identical beasts. The names you give them only appear on screen when you’re close by, and their personalities are not unique enough to distinguish them. I think of other games that had me bond with animals through their idiosyncrasies: the first Black and White, Sonic Adventure 2’s Chao Garden, The Last Guardian and even the Alters. I wondered how they’d succeeded where Herdling failed. Could it be as simple as time? Those games ran for 20+ hours, and most of the time you had one or two animals to care for. Or was it because my herd mostly looked the same? But the Alters gives you six or seven people, with the same outward body type and voice, and made each so unique I could tell which two clones were arguing with each other, off-screen, using their voices alone. Within an hour, each alter felt deeply-characterised, and clearly stated. But that never happened with Herdling.

In the end, it was never enough. The herd was too tame, too eager to follow my orders, too smart. I grew up with dogs, and those creatures are arguably intelligent, but yet they’re also *stupid*. Many a dog has brought me the better part of a tree limb, only to get it caught between two trunks and get stuck. And sheep, goats, and other herd animals I have on farmers’ authority are almost professional self-endangerers. Living in an agricultural area, you hear a dozen stories of herd animals that have trapped their heads in mesh fences, or escaped their pastures with the skill of a Tom Cruise character, only to fall in a ditch and be unable to right themselves.

Dangers such as jagged, rusty metal or terrifying owl-eagle creatures threaten your burgeoning herd, and their occasional bursts of obstinate free will make navigating the simple environments challenging. Of course, a game that asks for precise positioning and movement and provides independent idiots to herd gets frustrating fast, but I fear Herdling erred on the side of frictionless, and in doing so, sanded off each beast’s personality. I learned by unlocking the “ironherd” achievement that it’s even possible for my precious pets to die. Roughly 20% of players who finished Herdling lost an animal on the way. I imagine this had some emotional impact, especially for those who bonded with their beasts, but because of its vanishing paucity, eight out of ten players, myself included, never felt the bite of this emotional sword of Damocles.

We don’t demand every hobby have a story or a point or a moral. Fortnite doesn’t need a story¹ because it exists to be fun. Herdling doesn’t exist to be fun, so it must surely have a story, developed characters, and an emotional payoff, right? Why must we demand this of our games? We listen to music for so many reasons, and yet we play games for two? Fuck that. I left Herdling relaxed and at once invigorated. The journey was music and hiking and viewing a painting, the story minimal, the characters barely there, but the journey was an unspoken moment, emotion delivered through music, and sounds, and sunlight. Sometimes, a game doesn’t have to be fun or interesting, or change the way you think or feel. Sometimes a game is a few hours of herding goat-bison up a mountain, delivered with such clarity you almost feel the snowflakes on your tongue.