Home Sheep Home is a very clever and beautiful physics-based puzzle-platformer by Aardman Animations. You are tasked with getting your 3 sheep, Shaun, Shirley and Timmy, back to their barn by guiding them through 15 obstacle filled levels. Often you’ll need to find a way to bridge a gap, climb over a barrier or use one sheep to hit a switch that allows his (or her) buddies to advance. Each sheep is a different mass, weight and size which affects its ability to move objects, jump high or fit into certain spaces. In order to guide the sheep through the game, you must capitalize on each sheep’s strength. For example Shaun, the heavy one (he’s not fat he’s fluffy), is good for pushing heavy objects that little Timmy cannot, who conversely can fit into spaces his beefy brother can’t. The game is reminiscent of a classic puzzle-platformer for the SNES, The Lost Vikings, which is great company to be in.
The control scheme is simple, the art clean, cute and unique and the sound design is spot on (with the exception of the ambient bird noises that don’t loop cleanly). The level design is clever, but the 15 levels run out before the game gets too difficult. It’s a quick play but I hope they’ll learn from their success and release a new set of levels soon. They certainly don’t need to reinvent their game mechanics (*cough* Mario Kart: Double Dash) they just need to give us more levels [please]. If you haven’t already, go kill 20 minutes and play this game.
Thanks to Ajay Karat of The Devil’s Garage for the story tip.