Backlog Bonanza Month at last kicks off with a long-forgotten little oddity on the PlayStation 2 which goes by the name of Herdy Gerdy. Reception to this game has been split rather evenly as most reviewers seem to either despise it or view it as a brilliant, if flawed, classic. After having played through this game to completion, it has become fairly easy to see why reception has been so thoroughly split over the years, so let's go take a look.
Let's start with the obvious; Herdy Gerdy is a puzzle platformer about a boy named Gerdy and the gameplay revolves around him herding various animals into pens Pied Piper-style. One sentence in and the reasons for the divisive reception already begin to become apparent as, yes, this game is more or less made up of a string of ever-so-frequently-loathed 'escort missions'. Thankfully, Gerdy is a bit more of a literal Pied Piper than usual as the main method of herding most of the animals in the game is to play a flute which will cause a group of nearby animals to gather around and march behind Gerdy in a straight line. Not so thankfully, the AI issues which typically make escort missions such a chore are still somewhat present here as it is not entirely uncommon for one or two of the creatures near the back of the line to get stuck on a wall, fall off a ledge, or simply take a step into the ever-so-deadly water.
The aesthetics also are an entirely mixed bag. The game generally looks nice, being a product of the cel-shading craze at the time, but the design of the character models themselves ranges from bland to weird and the facial animations characters make, especially Gerdy's abnormally huge never-ending grin when he's just standing around, range from bizarre to outright creepy. The music is actually one of the strongest points of Herdy Gerdy and is wonderful to listen to, the song Gerdy plays when using his flute even varies based upon the current level's tune, but there also simply aren't all that many songs in the game so most of them get reused over and over. As for the voice acting, it's impressive that what seems to be a fairly low-budget game from 2002 is fully voice-acted, but the less said about the general quality the better, so I think I'll just let it speak for itself.
Yet if there is one aspect of Herdy Gerdy which I suspect most people can agree upon, it is the camera. Cameras in games have greatly improved over the years, but when the PlayStation hit many developers had trouble figuring out how to make a good camera for 3D environments and even when the PlayStation 2 rolled around developers still had a few kinks to work out. With this in mind, I can safely say that Herdy Gerdy still has such an exceptionally bad camera that it is not only poor for its time, but may very well be one of the worst cameras I've ever seen in a game on any console. Herdy Gerdy provides players with three different perspectives to toggle between - an entirely useless up-close view, a nearly-as-useless 'normal' view which is still far too closely zoomed in, and a somewhat tolerable overhead 'shepherd's view'. The camera constantly fights the player as sometimes it will let the player rotate it and other times it will refuse to budge, sometimes it will get stuck inside a wall, or sometimes the 'shepherd's view' will decide to put a tree, wall, or some other piece of the environment between itself and Gerdy, forcing the player to either remain completely blind to what's going on or to temporarily switch to one of the other far-worse views. Of course, many times the camera simply won't care which view the player wants and it will remain zoomed in on all three views; this usually happens inside winding passages, on ledges, or sometimes even near deep water or the herd-eating Gromps (which are the only real enemy in the entire game and which themselves must be lured into traps) just to add to the fun.
The other major issue Herdy Gerdy has is it doesn't seem to quite know what it wants to do with its mechanics. For example, 100 bells are hidden in every level and collecting all of them unlocks some interesting concept art or unused animations, but nearly all of the early-game levels hide a handful of these bells in places which Gerdy is incapable of accessing until he obtains other abilities far later in the game; bells reset upon leaving a level, so it is far too easy to spend a fair amount of time collecting nearly all of them only to discover that the last handful are hidden away somewhere Gerdy just can't quite reach. At other times, the game becomes outright counter-intuitive with the bells and certain ledges; the pink, bear-like Gromps will knock Gerdy into the air and back to the start of the level (and then proceed to eat his herd) if they catch him, but in certain locations they will instead knock Gerdy up onto an unseen ledge with a few bells which otherwise cannot be accessed, leading to one of the strangest cases of guess-and-test gameplay I have ever seen. The issue with bells gets more bizarre in the later levels as paths start to appear which only open up after Gerdy has collected a certain number of bells in the level, transforming them from an optional collectible to an essential gimmick; many late-game levels even require Gerdy to collect all 100 bells (bells are thankfully at least easier than usual to find in these levels), which completely eliminates any sense of achievement gained from unlocking the concept art from that level.
Herding itself is also an odd gimmick. Gerdy generally has to successfully herd a certain percentage of animals into their proper pens to unlock paths to new levels, but there is no reason given for why the citizens of the world of Herdy Gerdy are so in love with the concept of herding as only rarely does an NPC come along whom actually needs help herding animals for one reason or another; unlocking a new level itself is strange as it requires finding and talking to an old gypsy after attaining the required herding percentage, but even these gypsies give absolutely no reason for their herding requirements other than telling Gerdy something along the lines of "you still need to herd more animals before I can take you to the next level" (and yes, the game constantly breaks any sense of immersion by having characters refer to areas as 'levels' and making other blatant gameplay-based references). In fact, aside from a very small amount of endgame stages which require all of the animals to be properly herded, there is absolutely no incentive to do so; a "stage clear" message will appear after all of the animals have either been herded or died and sometimes an NPC will give Gerdy some of the bells for a level when this occurs, but not even so much as the message changes when this 'stage clear' is completed when it is achieved entirely through proper herding, so in an unintentionally morbid twist the game encourages players to simply lead the herds into various deathtraps after the next area has been unlocked.
Lastly, Herdy Gerdy just doesn't seem to know what to do with itself in general. The game keeps track of a player's 'fastest time' for each level in an attempt to add replayability, but herding itself is a rather slow, often even tedious, process which is completely at odds with this more arcade-based gimmick. The story bounces around all over the place with mini-arcs which generally go absolutely nowhere, friends and antagonists who appear for all of one area and are never seen again, and a main plot which begins with Gerdy's father somehow being placed under a sleeping spell by a rival whom Gerdy must defeat in a tournament to Gerdy needing to defeat this same rival in order to save his island from danger despite the fact that I do not believe it is ever mentioned as to just why the entire island is apparently in danger in the first place. To add to the confusion, Herdy Gerdy is an attempt at a typical 'coming of age' story as Gerdy grows to become a 'great shepherd', but, as has already been mentioned, there is never any sort of explanation given as to why shepherds are so important in Gerdy's world and Gerdy himself only rarely says anything beyond making noises of confusion/surprise or giving single-word responses, meaning he never really grows as a character because there is simply not much to him to begin with. Even the level unlocks make little sense as there are often multiple paths Gerdy can take, but all except one will almost always be blocked off in one way or another, resulting in a far more linear type of progression than the world map would indicate.
Overall, Herdy Gerdy isn't a terrible game, but it isn't a very enjoyable one either. It has some nice touches and certainly seems to have had a lot of effort put into it, but the mechanics are simply all over the place and rarely work together well while the camera is bad enough that there were more than a few times during my playthrough where I simply decided to quit because I was sick of fighting it nearly every step of the way. Still, some people clearly are able to forgive Herdy Gerdy's shortcomings and have enjoyed it immensely and it's hard to argue against at least giving the game a try when it can be found for as little as $0.01 (plus shipping of course) online.
Herdy Gerdy can be purchased online from Amazon or eBay for as low as $0.01 used and under $10 new.
In honor of Backlog Bonanza Month, here is once again a link to the excellent Backloggery.
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