Welcome to The Flock, an asymmetrical online multiplayer thriller in the form of a game which is still in it’s Alpha stage. Steeped in horror, The Flock is filled with unscripted jump scares and butt clenching as you play through the short and intense matches whilst navigating the cluttered map. Now before I explain the meaning of this article, let me digress a bit and explain the game to you. In The Flock, you get to play as one of the agile hunters who make up the Flock (all who vividly look like Venom from Spiderman), with the goal of hunting down the one poor bugger who walks around with a lamp, desperately trying to keep you and your Venom-like friends at bay. Upon successfully hunting him down, you then adopt the mantle of the Carrier.
To go into further detail, all players in a match start off as members of alien race. Your goal is to find the coveted Light Artifact and in interacting with it, to be transformed into a slightly more graceful, far more slower humanoid being. Plus you start walking on two legs instead of all four like the other undignified players. However, you are vulnerable as a Carrier and your only defence is the lamp you’re given. Shine the light the lamp emits onto one of the moving Flock and you kill them. Thus your goal is to stay alive as long as possible, slowly accruing points over time. Unfortunately to you, the maps are very dark and dim, and shining your lamp around is akin to firing off a flare. You find yourself constantly on the edge of your seat with the hair stand up on your nape.
As a member of the Flock you have but one goal. Kill the Carrier and claim his title, powers (which constitute a major downgrade in my opinion) and carry the lamp to victory. Your agility and speed come into play when trying to attack the Carrier unaware and as a defence against the beam of light he may shine in your direction you have the option to transform into stone, effectively morphing into a gothic gargoyle which, if you stumble upon as a Carrier, will have you suffering from a fit of nightmares for days to come.
But here’s the biggest catch, the game will only be alive as long as it’s players are. Volgelsap, the developer of the game, recently dropped a bombshell by stating that their are only a limited number of lives in the game. Effectively, all players are party to this one pool of life. Every death in the game drains the pool a little more until there are no more lives and the game turns off. Permanently. If this game wasn’t intense enough, you can now get the additional shiver up the spine everytime you die as you realise you’re bringing the game closer to it’s end.
I think it’s a fantastic idea. There isn’t much else to The Flock than this gamemode (as far as we can see from the Alpha). We’ve seen games die out from the single, repetitive gameplay (think Titanfall and Evolve). With this population announcement, gamers are sure to flock to the game to play it for as long as it exists (there will be the trolls who migrate to it as well, to die repeatedly) and when the game finally does die, it dies with dignity of some sort, rather than ageing into a semi-catatonic game that people bring up at tea parties attended by Kony.
