And so ends my playthrough of the five games I got in the TinyBuild bundle. This one is a mobile puzzle game that got ported to Steam (as is so common these days), but it plays perfectly fine with a mouse. It made for a great thing to occupy my mind with while I was catching up on some podcasts ^w^ . It's got like 150 levels that took me like 6 or so hours to get through trying my damdest to get 3 stars on every mission (which I sadly could not XP), but I had a lot of fun~ It's also worth noting that the game basically has no text in it, and all the tutorials and cutscenes are communicated only through progressions of pictures, so while the theme is a bit dark, ability to read shouldn't stop someone from being able to enjoy it :)

The premise of Divide by Sheep is that Death is lonely and wants friends, so he goes up to the upper world to kill(?) sheep, wolves, and pigs to get him some fluffy animal friends to play with. Using some sheep, wolf, and pig ferrymen, you need to guide the correct number of each respective animal in the correct order to pass each stage, and fulfilling one of the missions will earn you a star (do all 3 to get 3 stars). You also occasionally need to kill a certain amount of animals to fill up Death's own ferry with souls, or feed a certain amount of any animal to a giant monster, and this makes for a total of 5 types of mission goals for each level. The theme is certainly macabre, but the art style is very cutesy and it has a nice sense of humor to it. There's even a set of lasers that sheep can go through to get cut in half (and take up twice as much space as they used to), but if you get two halves on the ferry, they'll tape the sheep back together with a big bit of duct tape around his midsection XD

There are a certain number of islands in a 3 x 3 pattern that you can hop the animals between, but they can only go to adjacent islands, not all 9 islands are always present, and not every island is the same size. If you have 4 sheep on a 6-square island going to an adjacent 3-square island, one of those sheep is gonna die. You also have mechanics like how pigs always push off sheep of an island they're going to (even if space is otherwise free) and how wolves will eat sheep and pigs that they land with but then be unable to move again themselves. It's quite a complex puzzle game that I enjoyed quite a lot ^w^

Verdict: Recommended. It's a well designed puzzle game that gives quite a good amount of content for the $5 price tag. The only thing I'd say is that you're probably better off getting it on mobile unless you can get it for crazy cheap on Steam and you're okay playing it on a mouse. The levels are short enough that they're perfect to play during small breaks or if you just wanna kill time. A good little mobile game, but nothing that's setting the world on fire with ingenuity.

Reviewed on Mar 19, 2024


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