Shephy (Switch eShop) Review

If you’d have told me a year ago that I’d be reviewing an amped up version of solitaire in which your main goal is to breed sheep, I’d probably have laughed in your face. Shephy seemed to come out of nowhere, without any sort of fanfare, and without publisher Arc System Works promoting it in any meaningful way. It just appeared on the Switch eShop one day, and after spending some time with it, I’m glad it did. Shephy might not be the most innovative game on the market, but its visual design is adorable, and its engaging and challenging gameplay very quickly made it one of my most played games on the system.

Shephy, at its core, is a new twist on solitaire. It’s a single player card game with a simple goal, but it’s incredibly difficult to master. As the player, you’re tasked with collecting 1000 sheep in four turns. You have seven spaces on the field, and each one can be taken up with a sheep card of 7 different ranks — 1, 3, 10, 30, 100, 300 and 1000. You also have a hand of 5 event cards, some positive and some negative, and each turn ends when you’ve exhausted the entire deck of twenty cards and used (or discarded) every last one. It sounds simple, but it’s far from it.

Much like solitaire, a lot of the gameplay in Shephy relies on luck and careful planning. Some event cards will let you clone a card on your board, but which card do you clone? When do you clone it? Should you clone your 100 sheep card now, or wait until you have a 300 sheep card to maximise its output? You have to play a card to progress, and sometimes all you have left is negative cards. As much as you’re relying on luck of the draw, you can’t play this game without a solid strategy, and until you stumble upon that strategy, you’re going to lose. A lot. It took me roughly 100 games to win just once, and I’m almost certain that the first time I won was a total fluke.

It might sound like Shephy is a game you have to sink a lot of time into, but it’s actually better played in short bursts. Each game only takes about 10 minutes at the most, and it’s often much shorter if you get a bad draw or just can’t pull off the win. It’s great for a bit of time-wasting on your lunch break or for squeezing a couple games in on the bus. And it’s entirely playable on the touch screen or with joycons — whatever way you want to play, Shephy is right there with you.

There are four ways to play Shephy, each with its own goals and conditions. The first is Basic Mode — this is just as it sounds, it’s the base gameplay, get to 1000 sheep in four turns or less. I’ve put more time into this mode than any other, simply because I don’t have to worry about going fast or bizarre win conditions.

The second is Challenge Mode, which is probably what most players will turn to once they’ve had some time to get their bearings on the game. Challenge Mode is all about racking up points by playing fast and keeping your sheep alive. The faster you go, and the less sheep you kill, the higher your score will be. Of course, this is a single player game, so you’re not necessarily competing against anybody else, which is a touch disappointing. I’d have liked to see a scoreboard at the very least, if not a way to directly play against somebody, but I can respect the desire for, and delivery of, a purely single player experience.

There’s also a Practice Mode, which is more or less the base game, but without many of the stricter parts of the gameplay. You can choose to have the more devastating cards removed from play, or have the goal be 100 instead of 1000. No matter what type of practice game you play, the turn limit is always lifted, so you can keep going until you hit your goal. It’s more or less a place to try things out, see what works and what doesn’t, without the stresses and brutality of the main game.

Finally, there’s Post Loves, which is by far the most bizarre portion of Shephy. Post Loves is the closest the game comes to having a story mode, and what a strange and dark story it is. The universe in Post Loves is one of that in which Sheep have evolved to be just as civilised and intelligent as humans. They want to be seen as equals, but the humans aren’t having it. They’re worried that after centuries of keeping sheep in small fields and exploiting them for meat and wool, the sheep will turn against them, and overrun the earth. In an effort to stop this, the humans start a riot and try to kill the sheep. In an act of defiance, one shepherd, who loves, and is loved by, his flock, builds an interdimensional transporter (the Seed Hashing Event Plane Herd Yielder, or S.H.E.P.H.Y. for short), and begs his flock to leave him behind and search for a new world where they can be safe and free.

There’s an argument to be made that the story touches on a very real social and moral issue of livestock conditions, but it’s a flimsy connection at best. The translation efforts are a little iffy too, with some phrases presented awkwardly and some making no sense at all. The game gives you enough to get the gist of the story, but anyone who’s expecting a literary masterpiece is going to be sorely disappointed. The story is dark and goes to some heavy places, but it’s really just a framing device for the bizarre rules and conditions that are thrown at you in each chapter.

For example, in the first chapter, all negative cards are replaced with a card called Plague, which wipes out all of one rank of sheep. This forces you to make sure you have a couple of different ranks, just in case you end up with all Plague cards and have to wipe something out to progress. In a later chapter, you have to make sure that you have at least one card of each rank on the field by the time you reach the end of the fourth turn.

These chapter-specific rule sets can be extremely challenging, and it’s clear that Post Loves is designed to be tackled after you’ve gotten a firm grasp on the gameplay and strategies of Basic Mode, but they’re a very effective way to mix up the gameplay and provide some fresh experiences in a game that’s otherwise very repetitive. I don’t say that as a negative point, though, the repetitive nature of the game is what makes it so engaging. No matter how many times you play the same cards, the circumstances will always be different, and the thought process that goes into adapting to every situation is a good way to flex your thinking muscles.

Shephy is the embodiment of Nolan Bushnell’s Law of game design: “All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.” It’s an excellent, if a little absurd, premise and it’s executed solidly, with enough charm in its visuals to make the gameplay interesting enough for just about anyone. While it might not be excellently translated, and the story mode might be a bit on the strange side, the strategy elements of the game are enough to keep anybody coming back for more. I never would have expected a card game about breeding sheep to find its way into my heart, but Shephy did just that, and it’s very become one of my favourite games on the Switch. It might not be a candidate for game of the year, but it’s one I’ll be playing for many years to come, and in the end, isn’t that what matters most?