10 years: Stephen's Sausage Roll still one of the most influential puzzle games
44 points by tobr 4 days ago | 11 comments
Mond_ 45 minutes ago
No shade thrown, but I always preferred my game with some amount of story or artistic ambition beyond mere puzzling.
replyI'd take Void Stranger or probably even Deadly Rooms of Death: The Second Sky over Stephen's Sausage Roll any day, I imagine.
Boxxed 9 seconds ago
Deadly Rooms of Death is criminally underrated and generally unknown. Journey to Rooted Hold is personally my DRoD of choice.
replywhy_at 6 minutes ago
Yeah same here. I love puzzle games but there needs to be something to it besides puzzles for puzzles sake for me.
replyI've seen this game recommended many times but I've never played it because I feel like I would get bored very fast. Same with Zachtronics games.
gorgoiler 38 minutes ago
If you or anyone else reading this haven’t finished Stephen’s Sausage Roll to the very end, including reading all the story book paragraphs along the way (which increase in poignancy and frequency as the game winds to a close) then I strongly encourage you to do so. No spoilers!
replyde•li•cious saus•ag•es
rodarmor 26 minutes ago
I wish that Opera Omnia, also by Stephen Lavelle, got more attention. It is mind-blowing exploration of the idea of propaganda and revisionist history, which somehow also manages to be engaging and fun, with an incredibly unique core mechanic.
replynemomarx 22 minutes ago
https://www.increpare.com/game/opera-omnia.html
replyThis one? It looks interesting but definitely a lot less visible than SSR and not on storefronts or etc, right?
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.
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.
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.
rolled, surely