Brainfruit's Sheeps turns a sleep trick into a roguelite
Rob Dubbin and Garrett Miller's game premiered at Nick Sylvester's LA gallery, scored live, beside wool landscapes by Miller's mother.
Brainfruit Studio, the North Carolina studio run by Rob Dubbin and Garrett Miller, has announced Sheeps, a roguelite built on a single action: counting. Sheep pour out of a rift and across a field, and the player enters how many crossed. Accurate counts earn upgrades. Bad ones let crows eat the player's peanuts, which serve as health. The game is planned for PC, Mac, and SteamOS in 2027, and the store page is open for wishlists. Seems simple enough and yet....
A 20-second silent excerpt from the Sheeps trailer. The full trailer, with sound, is on the store page.
The difficulty comes from interference. Balloons drift across the field, wolves arrive in sheep's clothing and wind pushes the flock back over the line. I found my mind racing to keep up—was that a small flock? Did I grab each one? Are they hiding behind each other? Upgrades push the other way: every fifth sheep dyed blue, a guaranteed even count, a magic bag with vacuum suction. There is drop-in couch co-op, a set of minigames and a cast of animals, including a dye-obsessed chameleon and a great many business llamas, written by Dubbin, an Emmy-winning writer from The Colbert Report. Miller, the other co-director, grew up on a working farm counting actual sheep.
Before the announcement, Sheeps showed as an artwork. In April, the Los Angeles gallery smartdumb premiered it as a new interactive work in a show called counting sheep. Musicians led by Smartdumb honcho Nick Sylvester, the producer behind records for Channel Tres and MØ and the gallery's founder, scored play live, and the walls held pastoral landscapes in hand-dyed lambswool by Dalis Davidson, Miller's mother. Sylvester also wrote the game's score, which moves from lullaby woodwinds into drum-and-bass breakbeats as a run gets harder.
Counting sheep is a way of letting attention go, and Sheeps turns it into a test of holding on. Dubbin's pitch is that the studio has "finally solved wakefulness." Brainfruit's previous game, Tide Breakers, was an A MAZE./Berlin nominee in 2025, and Dubbin turned up in these pages more than a decade ago, arguing in an email that chasing a culture's validation feeds the culture more than the maker.
For more reading see how sheep surveillance became an online game (2015) and a 2013 roundup that includes a playable documentary about insomnia.
Screens from Sheeps, courtesy of Brainfruit Studio.
Disclosure: Nick Sylvester was my college roommate and a dear friend.
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