FLOCKING HELL
- Hubert Spala
- Apr 28
- 4 min read
Sometimes a game can be deceptive. And by that, I mean its presentation makes you believe it is one thing, when it is something completely different. FLOCKING HELL absolute did throw me into a bit of a mental spin, because for some reason I was expecting like... a farming game with a twist. Maybe some puzzler about herding your sheep, those existed in the ancient past, a forgotten and tiny 'sub-genre' lost to time. But no, what we got instead is a peculiar - and well-crafted! - mix of roguelite turn-based strategy that plays a little bit like MINESWEEPER if it was fed some deckbuilding, resource management, and tactics into the cauldron.
The deceptiveness doesn't end there. Don't get lulled into a false sense of calm serenity by chill tunes, cutesy graphics, and adorable sheep you spend and collect. A demonic invasion straight from the gates of hell is waiting for you at the end of each stage, and it is in your hands to explore the square land for key resources, towns, mines, and more to stop it. And damn, it is not easy, either. Just clicking all willy-nilly on the map will quickly get you nowhere, and a proper plan of attack is in order.
There is a rather well-made balancing act here in play - you need to spend your valuable turns exploring, but each time you find something crucial, you need to make a call on what to do about it. Crystal mines are a must to pack full of hard-working sheep as fast as possible. Towns need to be found early to give them a chance to grow. Cards - costly as they are! - They are powerful tools to aid your planning as well as beefing up your towns for the coming invasion. On top of that, you have all those little bits and bobs that make a roguelike, well, a roguelike proper, with currency to unlock progressive upgrades and cards to craft a more flexible deck that suits your strategies.
You might feel a nice sense of triumph after beating the first campaign... Only to realize it was a tutorial, showing you the ropes. Giving you the info you need on how each structure works, how cards operate, and what upgrades you can rely on, before tossing you into a deep water of actual missions... Which pulls absolutely no punches and will test how well you can work with your very limited resources. It is, at its core, purely a mathematical game, where wise use of every single sheep in your stock is going to decide if you win or lose. This is a bit of a strange departure from the usual roguelike formula, which often allows you to pop off, to become an unstoppable juggernaut with all the elements you worked toward clicking together to make you a monster of your own. Nothing like that happens here, or at least, never felt that way no matter how much I've progressed... Perhaps it also harkens to the fact that the progression is a bit, well, slow. It is a grind. When you see a single card costing 200+ bells when you have 7 in your pocket after a run, it can be a little demotivating.
But it's not all doom and gloom - the game simply opts for a different sense of balance. Here you are more empowered to decide which approach you want to take, strengthened by your cards and guilds. Perhaps you want cards that make exploring the map easier? Sure, but that means you'll have fewer options to beef up your cities. But if you stack your deck with empowering towns or mines, you better get lucky and be on point with your exploration, because you can't upgrade towns that you never found in the first place...
Unfortunately, this leads to a sense of staleness, where run after run is repetitive to a degree that might feel a bit off. Even when the game tries its best to freshen up, with random modifiers for each stage, with new cards trickling in, ultimately, you'll keep doing the same thing, over and over. And with no new "weapons" or robust upgrade systems for meta-progression, this might put some players off playing more than a few runs before concluding that the game doesn't have much more to offer.
However, despite this flaw in pacing, the game does its best not to punish you too harshly whenever you fail. Even if you stumble and lose your tries on late missions during the campaign, you will still get your bells from conquered missions and unlock new stuff on the way to help you in future runs, so the progression isn't completely blocked behind a chain of successes. You can chip at it, game after game, to become stronger and have more options in your arsenal. New guilds, new cards, all come together to give you a fighting chance against the dreaded butchers waiting for you at the end of each campaign.
FLOCKING HELL still stands strong for its uniqueness - it is hard to even find games that I could compare it to, which is definitely a strong point for it! It's a mixture of mechanics that, thanks to creative implementation, works together nicely. And it is quite a feat to make sure that you, the player, feel in control when a game can have such a set of randomness behind it, with even the layout for the board influencing your options. Here, I never felt out of control - every decision is in my hands, and it is up to me to spend my resources wisely. And so, each time I fail, I never feel a need to blame the game for tripping me over. Just me for not thinking things through.
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