BAA! Never Stop Bleating Preview

When we dived into the plethora of demos Steam Next Fest offered with my amazing colleague, Gorz, I was not expecting to run into a tower defence-esque game about sheep protecting their flock from wolves and bulls. I was also not prepared for how entertaining said title was, though I’m getting ahead of myself! While we sampled the co-op games Next Fest had to offer, we ran into the demo for BAA! Never Stop Bleating.

In this charming little title, you play as an intrepid sheep with the sole purpose of protecting three young lambs from the hungry denizens of the forest with up to three friends. To achieve this wholesome goal, you have a number of resources and workbenches to build with in order to create a wall strong enough to keep any and all threats at bay.

The gameplay of BAA! is divided into night and day. During the first day of your career in amateur masonry, you’ll be given a workbench, a foundation, and possibly a fire depending on the level selected. Both the fire and workbench are used to refine resources, whereas the foundation is where you will build your formidable wall, though that is done during the night. During the daytime, you are free to clear clumps of resources if they’re in the way (though they will be lost for the coming night) and can move your foundations, workbenches, and other tools as you please.

After the first night, you will also be given a collection of locked boxes and pedestals to choose from, each of which will require the use of a key. Keys are dropped by enemies. The pedestals can be used to upgrade tools, randomise the boxes you received, or swap tools for keys. Finally, you can do a “rehearsal” for the upcoming night to see an approximation of the coming waves.

Once you’re ready to take on the night, you simply give a mighty BAAH and the night begins. While it’s dark, you are able to gather and process the resources of the level, be they clay for the bridge or wood for the forest. Collecting and refining resources is easy enough: you simply bonk it with your fluffy body (i.e. walk by it) to collect/interact with the item in question. So, for example, you could walk by a clump of clay to get some on your back, run it over to the workbench to shape it into a brick, plop it on the fire to bake, and then rush it over to your wall to strengthen it against the enemy attacks. If your defences falter, or you yourself are hit by an incoming foe, one of your three lambs will perish. If the last lamb falls, it’s game over.

In addition to workspaces and more foundations, the toolboxes you are presented with at the start of each day may contain other useful items to keep the nightly terrors at bay or make your wall-building efforts a bit more efficient. For example, you may find scarecrows that slow enemy movement down, little lamb helpers that can speed up production or transfer items to workstations, or summoning stones to create more resources. BAA! Never Stop Bleating does a wonderful job of taking a simple mechanic and giving it complexity as you progress, since you’ll be constantly balancing useful upgrades and resource nodes with your own mobility, as the workspaces and other tools can make your little redoubt quite cramped.

I can imagine this game being less fun by yourself, as the addition of a friend adds a delightful bit of chaos to the mix, but I think there’s much here to enjoy. The gameplay is easy but entertaining and the little sheep are just plain cute. The game didn’t feel overtly difficult on our short playthrough, so it was less a mad dash for survival than a well-paced dive into the wonders of masonry. Though BAA! Never Stop Bleating doesn’t have a release date at the time of writing, I do think this is a couch co-op game to keep an eye on.