A game about giant, helpless teddy bears fleeing a dying world may be a bit on the nose right now, but it's also my favorite game of 2025

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:

I will kill for you.

I will die for you.

I will save you.

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.

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 explicit narrative.

In gameplay terms, Herdling is even simpler than its predecessors, and gamers who use "walking simulator" as a pejorative won't find much to like here. No judgment, everyone likes what they like, and Herdling definitely isn't much of a mechanical experience: Corralling your charges takes a little getting used to because you're nudging them from behind, so everything is reversed—come at them from the right when you want to herd them left, that sort of thing—but once you've got a handle on that, well, you've got about 80% of the challenge figured out.

But it is a powerfully emotional experience. Herdling's lush gameworld and brilliant, distant vistas kept me pushing ahead, but what really sold it was how utterly dependent on me the calicorns were for their survival. They're obviously intelligent, they just don't know what to do: The world of humanity is so foreign to them, they're trapped, frozen and helpless. It's a bit like ET, if ET was the size of a Volkswagen microbus, cute instead of hideously ugly, and there were a dozen of them.

As simple as Herdling's mechanics are, there are times when things get tense. A furious downhill flight from predators is one obvious moment, but an earlier section was just as stressful. At first blush it seemed like our only option was to rush through the grim, gloomy stretch of withered forest and hope to bull our way past whatever was lurking in the dark—because obviously something was. But I noticed what appeared to be traps of a sort, and as an experiment I led my calicorns past them, slowly and delicately. Sure enough, there was no response—no noise made, no hunters aroused.

But now I was in the middle of a thick, gnarled wood, surrounded by tripwires and sleeping predators, and my only option for safe passage was to guide my calicorns—my large, furry, cumbersome, occasionally-prone-to-wandering calicorns—safely through it all. We made it, very slowly, and with the occasional admonition, hissed quietly at my monitor through gritted teeth, to please be goddamn careful god dammit what is wrong with you go left go left jesus christ slow DOWN!

But I took it all back when we reached safety on the other side. I didn't mean a word of it. I love my calicorns.

And yeah—I saved them.