Home Sheep Home Review

Shaun the sheep and his friends Timmy and Shirley are looking to escape the farm. To do so they’ll need to navigate the treacherous barnyard terrain and work together to complete more than a dozen puzzles. Can you use your noggin’ to solve 15 different physics-based scenarios and help this trio to break free of the farm?

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Shaun the sheep and his friends Timmy and Shirley are looking to escape the farm. To do so they’ll need to navigate the treacherous barnyard terrain and work together to complete more than a dozen puzzles. Can you use your noggin’ to solve 15 different physics-based scenarios and help this trio to break free of the farm?

Home Sweet Home presents a number of charming puzzles for the physics-loving gamer to solve. Each puzzle presents a scene, and your goal is to get all three sheep from their starting point to an exit on the far right. You’ll control each sheep using the WASD keys, and you’ll switch between sheep by tapping 1, 2, or 3.

Each of the sheep is a different size. Shirley is the biggest, Timmy the smallest, and Shaun is in between. Size plays an important part in Home Sheep Home, as there will be certain areas of a puzzle only accessible to the smallest or certain objects that can only be moved around by the largest. The three sheep will have to use teamwork to solve the majority of puzzles presented in Home Sheep Home.

All of the puzzles rely heavily on physics, so again, you’re going to have to be thinking about the weight of each sheep before tasking them to do certain things. If you need to get a swing moving, Timmy would be a poor choice. If you need to climb up high by jumping, Shirley would be utterly useless. Some puzzles are as simple as “knock this wooden board down so that all three sheep can cross,” while others involve a variety of elements that might leave you scratching your head for a bit.

Home Sheep Home

The puzzles offer up a perfect level of challenge – never so simple that they get boring, but never so complicated that you’ll walk away in a fit of frustration. As an added bonus, every time you restart a level a new tip gets written into the scenery. The tips start out vague, but become more and more direct as your number of retries begins to grow. A first tip might read “Maybe something heavy could move this,” while a tenth tip might provide a complete walkthrough like “place Timmy here, have Shirley push this box, have Shaun use this board like a diving board.” It may sound as though the game is giving too much away, but by the time you’ve reached that point you’ll just be relieved to have a solution.

While they were all enjoyable, the best puzzles were the ones that required the sheep to really work together. In some instances you need to build a sheep stack to reach high areas. In others you’ll need to get Shirley to move a trampoline for Timmy to jump on. The game’s second-to-last puzzle does a tremendous job of forcing the sheep to work together. I won’t give anything away, but I’ll simply say that every step of the puzzle required every sheep to be doing something different so that they could all get to the exit in the end. It was brilliantly designed.

The visuals are charming, the puzzles are challenging, and gameplay is unique and fun. Weighing in at only 15 levels, Home Sheep Home is a relatively short experience that we wished would have gone on longer. And did we mention that it’s based on a children’s show? That’s right – Shaun the Sheep is the Shaun the Sheep of BBC Kids fame (which in turn was a spin-off of something we geekier adults should be familiar with, Wallace and Gromit in A Close Shave). Whether you’re a closet sheep herder, a nerdy adult, or a lover of fun physics games, Home Sheep Home will be 20 minutes of your life well spent.

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      80 out of 100
      Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.