Sometimes, developers have an amount of money fall into their laps they never expected to see, and that lets them make whatever they want. When that happens, what comes out of it is always fun.
When No Brakes Games made Human: Fall Flat, I think it’s fair to say that getting 58 million sales and becoming one of the top ten best-selling games of all time was not within the team’s expectations. Yet here we are, and while a sequel to Human: Fall Flat is in the works, in the meantime the team has had the freedom to work on just about any project they wanted.
Enter Tiny Flock, a VR puzzle game about herding sheep, and that idea of “making whatever we want” shines through in every aspect of this game and in the event I was invited to for a hands-on preview.
For starters, a VR-exclusive title isn’t something that’s going to go mainstream. Even the team themselves admitted that the VR market is in a bit of a dip right now, but that’s fine, because a team without the overwhelming burden of being shut down if they release a single flop can just make something creative that the VR market hasn’t seen in quite a while. I’d be surprised if Tiny Flock single-handedly revived it, but I suppose you never know.
But it goes deeper than that. The game’s soundtrack is made almost entirely by a cello artist, who was hired simply because he’s the favourite artist of one of the producers – who was then brought to London to play a solo concert for us at the preview event. Why? Well, why not? When you’ve got a degree of freedom to make and hire whoever you want, why wouldn’t you hire your favourite musician?
That’s the vibe that carried throughout the whole preview event. I know there’s always the cynical perspective of being wined-and-dined so I’ll say nice things about the game, but this really did come across as a team who loved what they’re creating, trying to find the best way to show that to the world, without being limited by the need for a harsh bottom line.
But ok, this is all well and good, but all these high-minded takes about creative freedom don’t mean much if the gameplay can’t back it up, so what’s Tiny Flock actually like to play?
It ticks the first box of anything that wants to be a great VR game: It’s a game that can only work in VR. A 3D environment spawns in front of you, and at one end you will get some sheep, while at the other will be somewhere they want to graze, and you must transform your hands into a carrot on a stick to lead the sheep to their grazing spot.
Of course, the path to their grazing spot is rarely a straightforward path, and that’s where the puzzle element comes in, as you’ll be using the objects in the environment and the game’s physics system to get the sheep over gaps, around obstacles, and various other things seeking to eat them so they can safely reach their goal.
Each environment is like a little diorama in front of you and is fully manipulable, both in terms of the objects within it and the level itself, which you can pick up, move around, rotate, and so on to view it from any angle. This gives it an advantage over something like Moss, for example, as you’re not limited to a single perspective, so you can make any environment as complicated as you like, or even hide things from the player’s initial viewpoint as part of the puzzle.
To use one of the basic puzzles I played at the preview as an example, it’s a simple setup with the sheep on one side, the grass on the other, and a big bottomless pit between those two things. Directly in front of you is half of a bridge which, if you try to set it up, will just fall into the pit. It isn’t until you turn the level around that you find the other half of the bridge sticking out of the rock, and then you have to carefully slot them in at the same time, leaning up against one another, so that you have a stable bridge for the sheep to cross.
It’s that kind of physics-based solutions that make this impossible to do outside of VR. You need two hands and the precision of direct movement to be able to solve even a very simple puzzle like that one, and trust me, the complexity most certainly ramps up from there.
Combine that with a cutesy aesthetic and levels that encourage you to mess about and have fun with all the random objects and elements the team has thrown in there, and Tiny Flock is a delightful experience. Will it set the world on fire? Probably not, but will it be the very best at what it’s trying to accomplish? I think it just might.
Tiny Flock launches on September 29, 2026, on Meta Quest and Steam VR