Bite-Sized! Sheepy: A Short Adventure
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Hello and welcome to Bite-Sized! — a new format where I will be highlighting smaller games that I am not going to make a big essay about but still want to recommend. These will be either small games that can be beaten in less than 3 hours or so, or iterative games that focus on finding hidden objects or assembling puzzles. I do love a good puzzle or hidden object game, but I find that I don't really have a place to talk about them, so we'll try it out with this new little format. I hope you enjoy it! Also, if you have an idea for a better name — drop it in the comments below. "Bite-sized!" works fine up until the moment a game has some bitable name, and then it starts getting kind of embarrassing, so I am open to suggestions.
We'll start off with something I have just played: Sheepy: A Short Adventure. It is a 2D platformer developed by Mr. Suicide Sheep about a little sheep plushy brought to life.
Sheepy is a perfect little gem that takes about an hour from start to finish. I think of it as a proof of concept, or a showcase, but it is a complete experience that is quite well-paced. The pixel art is gorgeous, the controls are tight, and the execution of the platforming is simply superb. Throughout Sheepy you get a few abilities, and it is very easy to move around using them. Traversal in this game is like breathing.
Surprisingly, the atmosphere is quite intense, made even more so by the music. Exploring the abandoned underworld, listening to tapes, reading notes while having a growing feeling of wrongness, of something lurking below, or just around the corner, reminded me heavily of INSIDE, one of my favorite games of all time.
It is honestly quite amazing how many things Sheepy does successfully on its tiny scale: not only do you get to explore the underground, from the sewers to the depths of an archeological site, you also level up your platforming quite significantly, not to mention light puzzle elements and — maybe — even bossfights? You also get a complete story that you can piece together from notes, recordings and environmental clues. It's like a full-sized metroidvania platformer scaled down while retaining proper pacing and consistent atmosphere. Truly incredible.
If you'd like to hunt for secrets, Sheepy has those too! There are hidden vinyl records that you can collect, and even though it seemed to me that I explored every nook and cranny, somehow I found only two :D
Sheepy: A Short Adventure is free on Steam and on Itch.io. I highly recommend giving it a try; it is a fantastic hidden gem. I will be following Mr. Suicide Sheep very closely now, hoping for, maybe, Sheepy: A Long Adventure in the future.
If you have any suggestions for Bite-Sized posts, leave them down below!
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Thank you very much for your time. Take care.
