Game About Giant, Helpless Teddy Bears Fleeing A Dying World May Be...

Herdling is a small, simple diversion, and sometimes that's exactly what you need.

In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.

I like shooting dudes—or stabbing them, setting them on fire, blowing them up, running them over with tracked vehicles, clubbing them to death with a hammer, whatever the latest game in my library calls for—as much as the next guy. It's fun! It also sometimes feels very limiting: I wonder, as I put three in the back of some digital rando's head for the thousandth time, is this all there is?

Herdling was my antidote to all the digital bloodletting of 2025. It's a light puzzle adventure game about life and hope, dreams and magic, where violence exists solely as something to be avoided. Any fool can kill, and as Herdling begins, those fools have done a great job of it: The world lies dying, a victim of neglectful indifference and selfishiness, and no one seems to care, or even notice.

But there is still magic to be found, if you know where to look amidst dirty underpasses and greasy parking lots—or if you're lucky enough to be awakened one night by a massive, majestic, furry beast called a calicorn, as I was when the game began. As soon as I saw my first capricorn, standing bewildered and unmoving amidst rusting cars and blowing garbage, I knew three things:

And we were off! It didn't take long for me and my adopted calicorn to leave the city behind on a glorious journey through majestic forests, plains, and mountains, gathering up new friends along the way. There were dangers here and there, too: Narrow ridges, unstable outcroppings, and sinister predators from whom we could only flee. Luckily, calicorns are quicker than they look, although not especially nimble—there were a few moments where I thought one of my companions would be lost, but in the end we took only a few scrapes and bruises along the way.

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I was confident going in that Herdling would be my bag. I'm a big fan of Okomotive's previous games, Far: Lone Sails and Far: Changing Tides, and while Herdling's 3D experience was a very different sort of adventure than those side-scrolling games, it maintains a very similar ambience, telling its story through vibes rather than an

Source: PC Gamer