Stephen's Sausage Roll is my favorite puzzle game. But more interestingly -- it's a near-universal opinion within puzzle communities that SSR is one of the all-time best. I've never heard of such a strong consensus in other subgenres of game.
Unlike other consensus "bests", it's relatively unknown to the public (which is understandable for many reasons). It's very likely that if you're a puzzle game devotee, you will fall in love with SSR; but at the same time, if you don't have experience with puzzle games, you'll very likely hate it.
As a result, I've always thought it's an interesting window into how we value "taste" and "mastery", how too much mastery can actually distance us from one another, and what meaning there is in designing games for an ideal world shaped around ourselves, versus the world we actually live in.
It's well-known that puzzle games sell badly on Steam, and I think part of that is that difficulty and struggle is an acquired taste. Most try to paper over that gap with nice soundtracks and graphics, "hooky" mechanics, and narrative. SSR is so interesting because it contrasts so violently: it's ascetic, has no obvious hook, and offers nothing but difficulty and struggle, and the best feeling in the world if you decide to push through it anyway.
Some of my favorites are puzzle games but I guess I’m not a member of the "community" (is there a message board?) and I’m surprised to hear there's any consensus on anything- my experience has been that most puzzle fans have a very specific subgenre they enjoy rather than enjoying "puzzle games" as a whole. I've had such little luck finding new games I enjoy that I don't pay any attention to puzzle game recommendations u less it reminds me of a specific game I already like. I've played several games in this genre (didn't know it had a name!) and they are very much not my thing.
Same reaction - I love puzzle games (The Witness, Talos principle, Blue Prince, Myst series, Baba is You, Antichamber, Obra Dinn, Opus Magnum etc), but haven't heard of this. I guess I should give it a try!
No mention of Snakebird in the comments. So here it is.
Snakebird is my vote for best puzzle game of all time
Very similar taste in games, and I had heard of it but wrote it off as a simple puzzle game, kind of in the mobile-game-esque throwaway genre. I must have been mistaken.
One of those things is not like the others
patrick’s parabox, too
And Void Stranger. I’m surprised not to see it mentioned anywhere in the comments.
”Thinky puzzle games” is a specific subgenre and community, revolving mostly around variations of sokoban, but really has an appetite for any game that deeply explores how a few mechanics can be combined and lead to interesting consequences.
It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is, without using niche words like "sokoban". The article talks about how the trailer for it didn't really show anything about the game either, which arguably gets you into pretentious/artistic territory.
After reading the linked article, and the comments here I still have zero clue about the game. It's a puzzle game involving sausages and a large fork does nothing to describe what kind of puzzles they might be.
> After reading the linked article, and the comments here I still have zero clue about the game
A video is worth a thousand words, and there's a video at the very beginning of the article. Did you watch the video?
You control a character on a grid and you have to push sausages around the grid in order to grill them (some of the floor tiles are grill tiles). That's the core game. But the sausages roll and you can't let a given side touch a grill more than once. And the grid is space constrained - you can accidentally push a sausage off the grid and it will fall into an abyss and you have to start over. The puzzles are very difficult because there is so much complexity that stacks:
- Your character can strafe and push things, but your character is also 2 tiles wide and can pivot and swing a fork (and the swing action can push things)
- sausages only roll along one axis, otherwise they slide
- sausages can be stacked into the 3rd dimension which means there's also gravity
- if a sausage falls on your character's head you can move it around and rotate it
- etc.
The game is about rolling sausages over grills to cook them on both sides. However, that's completely unrelated to why it's so acclaimed.
This game introduces a very small set of controls and mechanics (you basically only have the arrow keys, and initially can just move around), and combines it with minimally small, yet surprisingly hard puzzles. Every puzzles is distilled to its smallest form, and involves a genuinely satisfying eureka moment.
The game then explores every possible hidden way to use the minimal set of mechanics introduced, before introducing a new mechanic (e.g. early on you'll be able to suddenly 'stab' you sausages which allows you to move them around differently. So you become a master of the game as you progress.
The problem for new players is that it's deceptively difficult to solve even the simplest puzzles + it encourages you to explore and learn how things work instead of giving you hints. This makes inexperienced players abandon it way before it fully reveals itself (which takes many hours into the game).
What I suggest is if you are new and are frustrated, find a Youtuber that solved it so that you can look at what they did. This way you won't get stuck to the point of leaving it, while still allowing you to fully enjoy it.
The problem is, the ways that it's great are hard to put into words and explain for someone unfamiliar with the game. At least, not in a succinct way. At the most basic level it's just block pushing puzzles ("Sokoban").
Sokoban is a common word within puzzle game fans and devs. That article wasn't written for people that didn't like those kinds of puzzles in the first place.
Almost anybody who grew up with video games in the 80s played Sokoban and knows exactly what that refers to. It was THE puzzle game in the early days of video games... that and maybe millipede.
I only know what "sokoban" means because of the sokoban levels in NetHack.
So is there any way to explain it to the people who grew up in the half century since then?
Puzzles involving pushing blocks around a grid, where most of the challenge comes from the constrained motion. Blocks might get stuck if you push them into a corner, for example. It might be necessary to move things in a certain order, which isn't obvious at first.
"Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper". The original game was about moving boxes around in a crowded warehouse.
LMGTFY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban
Sure, though they're already familiar with it too.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5758783607eaa0...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlockPuzzle
Complaining that games may be described as "like Sokoban" is kind of like complaining that they might be described as "real-time strategy".
Being familiar with the concept isn't the same as being familiar with the term. The point that was being made by the parent comment that originally mentioned the term was that the game does not do a good job describing what it actually is to people who aren't already familiar with it. People who have never played a game in their life will know what the words "real", "time", and "strategy" mean, so I don't know how you can claim that it's anywhere close to the same thing.
Knowing what the word "strategy" means doesn't tell you anything about what a "real-time strategy game" is.
Even knowing what a "strategy game" is won't help, since the meaning of that term has shifted since "RTS" was derived from it.
Similarly, knowing that Sokoban means "warehouse guard" doesn't help you to know what to expect in a Sokoban game. But the fact that this is a common term familiar to ~everyone does.
When everyone around you is using a word with no problems, don't complain that you wish they'd all forget what it meant. Learn how to talk.
> When everyone around you is using a word with no problems, don't complain that you wish they'd all forget what it meant. Learn how to talk.
Literally this whole discussion started because someone else didn't know what it meant. No one said you should forget what it means, just that it's helpful to explain to other people so that they also will understand it in the future. Most people learn by asking questions and getting answers that explain things to them. The best way to get people not to learn is to incentivize them not to ask questions, which is exactly what you're doing by saying things like this.
> Literally this whole discussion started because someone else didn't know what it meant. No one said you should forget what it means
If you scroll up, you'll see that the discussion started when someone suggested that either the publisher, or the reviewer, should avoid "niche words like sokoban".
If we think they were talking about the review, that's pure nonsense; this is a review on "thinkygames.com".
If we think they were talking about the publisher, they're correct in spirit, but the advice to avoid not-actually-niche words like "Sokoban" is dead wrong. The publisher's page is intentionally uninformative. The description contains no information and the gameplay video contains no gameplay. I'd have to agree that that's an artistic choice that won't help to sell the game.
On the other hand, the user-defined tags on Steam aren't subject to that artistic choice, and they tell you right up front that this is a Sokoban game. That's how the game's player base describes the game. It's the only way they describe the game - the other popular tags are "puzzle", "indie", "difficult", singleplayer", and "cooking".
The advice "try not to let the people who'd be interested in your game know what it's about" is terrible advice.
(Tangent: I checked the user-defined tags for some other big games on Steam. Mostly they're extremely accurate. In one case, Vampire Survivors, the tags aren't very informative. But in that case, the video prominently displays a review quote that says "like popping bubble wrap to sick beats", which is an excellent description of the game.)
> It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is, without using niche words like "sokoban".
Sure, sure. Here's the annotated second paragraph from TFA:
Clicking link [3] leads us to a page that has this as its first paragraph: Incidentally, link [3] is repeated in the final paragraph of TFA, which I will also copy and annotate: Link [4] is pretty clear about what the game is. Did you bother to click it in order to "[l]earn more about Stephen's Sausage Roll", as it invites you to do?[0] <https://increpare.com/>
[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCNqYLGwqxU>
[3] <https://thinkygames.com/lists/best-sokoban-games/>
[4] <https://thinkygames.com/games/stephens-sausage-roll/>
[5] <https://thinkygames.com/games/stephens-sausage-roll/similar/>
> It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is
And even more if figuring out how to buy it wasn't a challenging puzzle in its own right.
Let me DGG that for you. Even dgg got this one right the first time!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/353540/Stephens_Sausage_R...
On sale for 6$ at 80% off.
[dead]
Stephen's Sausage Roll is great, but even among sokobanlikes, I'm loathe to call it the undisputed all-time best when it's up against Baba Is You.
Overall, I probably agree that Baba is You is a better game, but I think what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll receive so much praise is that the puzzle design is incredibly tight. It's a very straightforward concept and the core mechanic does not change between the first and the last level. But the puzzles are expertly crafted in a way that as you progress through the game you naturally come across situations where you think you know everything about the game and then it surprises you with a new mechanic that you did not expect.
Baba is You ramps up as you go to, but the ramping up is mostly done by the game giving you new tools to work with. Plus, the amount of interesting puzzles you can do with the mechanics of Baba is You is virtually endless, whereas SSG makes you feel like the game squeezed all the possible gameplay out of moving sausages around.
SSR walked so Baba could run
In favor of SSR: The design is more vertical than Baba, it explores fewer mechanics but with greater depth. And it's entirely spatial, whereas Baba's solutions are sometimes a matter of wordplay, with the sokoban just a formality.
I like Baba better, but I'm not sure if it's the better game.
> SSR walked
rolled, surely
I'll take Portal over it any day of the week
Portal is incredibly basic in its puzzles. There's barely any challenge even in the second game. Stephen's Sausage Rolls pushes its basic mechanics to the absolute limits and made me think significantly harder than Portal ever did. Not that Portal is a bad game mind you but it's not very deep as a puzzle game
I love Portal, but it feels more like a tutorial than a puzzle game, because the tolerances on each solution are so large.
It's a fantastic game, one of the all-time greats, and there are tricky parts to execute, but it's not particularly challenging in terms of puzzling.
what are some other games that belong to this group?
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and A Monster's Expedition are games in the same genre with much better presentation than Sausage Roll.
I always felt Deadly Rooms of Death (my preferred version being the free "Architect's Edition", but all are good, and many have better QoL features) was one of the puzzle games which was essentially "discovered" rather than invented.
Simple turn-based eight-direction grid movement, where one of your adjacent squares contains your "sword" and you can rotate your sword around yourself one square per-turn. Kill (deterministic and 1hp) monsters by moving your sword on to all the monsters move after your move, and "complete" a room by killing all monsters.
There's quite an active community (at least there was when I was in to it) but I've rarely heard it mentioned outside of the community.
Edit: I'm happy to see some other references to DroD in this thread.