Divide by Sheep Review

The story behind Divide by Sheep is total whimsy. Death is a lonely little soul with a sheep fetish (maybe he’s from Buxton, I don’t know), he just loves those wooly little ruminants. Being an anthropomorphic personification of the slide into decrepitude and the inevitable surcease of life, he can only be friendly with dead things. As a result and in a leap of somewhat startlingly stark logic, he decides to kill everything. In a flood. Old Testament style. Sploosh.

Now this is where you come in, it’s your task to float the little darlings on to rafts and rescue them from his bony clutches. So far so simple, but wait, they are on islands, and some islands only hold so many sheep. If you get them to jump from an island that can hold, say seven sheep onto one holding only four, three of them will drown and spent eternity as the grim reapers fluffy playthings! Ah well, them’s the breaks. Of course, just like islands, some rafts can only hold so many sheep, so you will have to strategically drown some of them anyway just to get to the end of the level.

And so it goes, sheep drown, sheep live, and as the game progresses you get to slice them in half with lasers (they get duct taped back together on the raft, don’t worry), bounce them off trampolines, and feed them to wolves. Of course, wolves need rescuing too, so them too get to bounce about like little black motes of soot. A fed wolf can’t bounce as that would cause nasty vomitory complications so they just sit there looking happy while the raft floats off into the sunset. While you tax your brain trying to work out how to meet all three victory conditions for the level or at least one of them so you can move on and see what devilry has been set in store for you next.

Visually, this game screams out what it is, a mobile game that has come to Steam. With blocky, voxel style graphics, cutesy sounds and music, and a user interface that screams out “I was on an iPhone” in a loud squeaky voice.

None of this detracts from the inherent addictiveness of flinging sheep at laser beams, fences and the occasional kraken however, in fact it enhances the dark comedic nature of the game and has you giggling at the animated cut-scenes that explain the latest twist to the game play with visuals of bisected ruminants, flying ungulates, and snapping canidae.