I’d Rather Be Sleeping than Writing This - Sheep Dreams Are Made of This Review

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Sleep can mean a lot of different things to different people. It can be an escape from reality; a chance to finally relax after another stressful day; a time of meditation and taking stock of events in your life. And for some, as in the case of Sheep Dreams Are Made of This, sleep can be a trap—a never-ending nightmare where they’re forced to relive their every mistake.

For my own part, I’ve never had a great relationship with sleep. My colleagues who see me up and working at all hours will confirm that. This last week was particularly bad, though. Between a mix of challenging work deadlines, nonstop anxiety, and the insomnia issues I’ve suffered from since I was a teenager, I don’t think I got more than twenty hours of shut-eye across the whole week.

This is all to explain how I got to that moment the other day, when I was lying awake at 6 a.m. I had just woken up from a nightmare, and I was unable to convince myself of the necessity of going back to sleep. Then I remembered that I had some work I could do without getting out of bed: I was supposed to check out some strange-named mobile platformer. With just a few taps, I downloaded Sheep Dreams Are Made of This, and the fate of my latest mostly sleepless night was sealed.

[Editor’s note: Last week we held a contest where TapTap users could submit their choices for hidden gems they recommended to other users and TapTap editors. We had so many great recommendations that we couldn’t wait to check some of them out for ourselves. Sheep Dreams Are Made of This was recommended by TapTap user @filan. Thank you to filan for the suggestion, and look forward to more TapTap Explorer opportunities in the future!]

In Sheep Dreams Are Made of This, you take on the role of, well, a sheep. Specifically, you’re a sheep running around on two legs inside of a twisted dream world. And when I say you’re running, I mean that you’re always running—the sheep is constantly zooming forward, and your only control options are to do a short jump by tapping one side of the screen or a high jump by tapping the other side. As he runs along, you must jump across platforms, gather colored blocks, and enter doors to move into new stages.

This might sound like a fairly typical platformer setup, but it breaks with genre conventions fairly quickly. For example, at first it seems like levels are ordered in exactly the way you’d expect: 1-1 through 1-4, then 2-1 through 2-4, and so on, all the way to 4-4. But the first time I screwed up a jump and missed a platform, I discovered something surprising: Falling into the endless void of your dreams does not earn you a game over or make you start over. Instead it warps you to a random stage of the next set.

So for example, fall into a pit in level 1-1, and you may end up landing on a platform in level 2-3. Don’t get your bearings fast enough there and continue falling, and you may show up in level 3-2. Sometimes I was able to get these level transitions to repeat in a way that I understood, but for the most part it felt like there wasn’t any discernible reasoning behind which falls led to which areas. It was, I suppose, a sort of dream logic.

As mentioned, Sheep Dreams’s stages only extend from 1-1 to 4-4—sixteen short levels in total—but it’s not as simple as just bounding through these, hitting the exits, and finishing. Within some of the levels, you’ll find special doors with a lock symbol on them. These will take you to a sort of hub area where you can access the first stages of each section and see a counter for how many blocks you’ve collected. Behind the stage entrances are a series of platforms that get filled in as you collect those blocks.

This is the true challenge of Sheep Dreams: You’re not just meant to finish each stage, but you must repeat them over and over until you’ve collected all four hundred blocks, one hundred in each section. Most of these collectibles are easy enough, but inevitably I hit a point in each area where there were just a handful of blocks that required the most precise jump possible. And when I screwed up that jump over and over again, instead of just restarting the level, my character would fall down, down, down into a completely different area, requiring a whole process just to get back to where I could try the jump again.

That’s maddening enough, but another way that Sheep Dreams represents its approach to the world of sleep is via constantly shifting perspectives. That is, sometimes when you load up a level, the camera will be zoomed far out, giving you a view of the whole area. Other times it will be zoomed in tight on the sheep, so close that you can barely even see what platforms and gaps are coming up. Other times the whole level will be flipped upside down, or you’ll suddenly find yourself running from right to left rather than the standard left to right. You can imagine the expletives that floated out my bedroom window when I entered level 4-3, attempting to clean up the last block I needed there for the twentieth time, only to be greeted with some insane skewed perspective that made properly orienting my jumps damn near impossible.

The repetition in Sheep Dreams Are Made of This is a pain in the ass, in other words. But on the same note, it’s hard to complain about that, because that’s also kind of the point. As you complete each area and unlock the blocks behind it, you’ll gain an understanding of the character who’s dreaming of this sheep. That backstory mostly comes in the form of tiny snippets of dialogue or inner thoughts revealing a broken man, a recovering alcoholic who keeps living through the same nightmare every night when he goes to bed.

I won’t spoil the exact nature of the trauma that has led to this man’s inability to move on other than to say that it is tragic and horrifying, and it’s hard to have sympathy for this person. But again, I think that’s as much the point of the game as anything else. This isn’t a title about people who sleep easy.

While I enjoyed Sheep Dreams’s willingness to tackle such difficult subject matter, I can’t say the format worked perfectly for me. The looping design of the game’s structure serves the subject matter, but it also maximizes frustration for players. The big reveal at the end is a gut punch, but after the annoyance of trying to nab those last few blocks in each area, I was too busy feeling relieved to really let the emotional reality of the ending wash over me the way it was seemingly intended.

Despite its flaws, though, I think Sheep Dreams Are Made of This is worth giving a shot. For one thing, it’s totally free with ads, and it has a great pay-what-you-want structure, so you can remove the ads for as little as $.99. That’s a wonderfully low barrier to entry. And beyond that, even if you’re one of those lucky people who doesn’t struggle with sleep, it’s worth putting yourself into the shoes of someone who does. Spend a couple of hours challenging yourself in this looping nightmare-world, and imagine living a life where those hours when you rest are tortuous.

As for me, I think I’ll take a nap.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Braid. Sheep Dreams is a much simpler game than Jonathan Blow’s indie masterpiece, but it shares one important element in common: using basic platforming gameplay as a vehicle for telling a dark story with a damaged protagonist.

• Spending every night in a waking hell of your own creation. If you’re a fan of self-sabotaging over and over until all you can do every night is lay awake staring at the ceiling and reliving all the ways you’ve screwed up and let down everyone you care about, Sheep Dreams is a great source of similar regret!

💬 If you’ve played Sheep Dreams Are Made of This, please let me know what you think! And if not, share your most annoying recurring nightmare! Do you ever have that one where it’s the end of the college semester, and you realize that there’s a class you somehow forgot about and haven’t attended the whole year, and now you have to do the final or get a failing grade? Just me?

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