Hubert: a tale of friendship, bravery, and barking at sheep

Hubert's store page ends on a line I reread three times before accepting it was serious.

A tale of friendship, bravery, and barking at sheep.

There is nothing to add. But I am going to anyway, because there is more here than a dog joke.

The game has no firm release date yet. No score.

The point of view

You are Hubert, a loyal shepherd dog, loose in the uncharted northern wilderness.

And the studio insists on a detail I find decisive: Hubert sees the world through movement, scent, instinct and curiosity.

That is a statement of intent, not a mood line. Making a game from a dog's point of view means giving up nearly everything adventure games use to guide you: the map, the objective marker, the quest log, the dialogue.

A dog does not read signs. It smells, it hears, it sees something move in the distance, and it goes.

If Brocap Studio holds that point of view all the way, we have an exploration game whose reading of the world is entirely different. If they let it go and put a compass at the top of the screen, it will be a pleasant adventure game with a dog in it.

That is the only thing that matters, and it is precisely what a store page cannot tell you.

The job

The mission is concrete: gather a scattered flock of sheep across gorgeous nature, braving harsh weather, treacherous terrain and hidden dangers.

The studio talks about a unique herding mechanic, experienced from the perspective of a working dog.

And that is an excellent subject for a game, for one simple reason: herding is not a problem of force, it is a problem of pressure.

A shepherd dog does not push sheep. It positions itself. It moves three metres in the right place, and forty animals shift. Move too far, and the flock scatters and the work starts over.

That is a mechanic of positioning and restraint, and I know almost no game that has treated it seriously. Whoever manages it will have something nobody else has.

Lily

Hubert is not alone. There is Lily, a sharp-witted kid who has just convinced the grumpiest farmer in the valley to give them a job.

Their relationship grows through shared routines, small moments and quiet trust. And the studio specifies that, as the world changes around them, that bond is tested in subtle ways, shaping how Hubert sees the world and why he keeps going.

That is a smart narrative construction, because it solves the mute protagonist problem: you cannot speak, but somebody beside you does, and your relationship with that person is the story.

The games that have successfully told something from an animal's point of view nearly all did that: they put a human alongside.

What I am watching

That instinct does not become an interface layer. Plenty of games announce that you perceive the world by smell and end up displaying coloured trails to follow, which is exactly the objective marker they claimed to be avoiding. The difference between those two approaches is everything.

Repetition. Gathering sheep is an excellent mechanic and it can tire. The terrain, the weather and the dangers will have to invent real problems, or you are doing the same field ten times.

And the length of the journey. The store page talks about a tale of friendship and bravery, which announces a narrative with an ending. That is reassuring: games in this register get lost when they decide to become sandboxes.

I have a weakness for games that pick an impossible point of view and commit to it. There was a game where you were a cat in a city of robots, another where you were an insufferable goose, and both worked because they refused to make us human for our own comfort.

A shepherd dog who does not understand everything, who follows a scent, and who has a job to do for a kid counting on him, is the sort of proposition that can be beautiful or a complete failure. There is no middle ground.

We will come back with a score when a date is announced.

Got a game where you played an animal that stayed with you? The list is short and we want it longer on the InsertCoins Discord.