Stephen's Sausage Roll

johnny_ultimate

At first I thought the hype was something of a joke - the likes of Jonathan Blow singing the praises of a crude looking game about rolling sausages. But then the incredibly positive reviews started rolling in (pun 100% intended), and I had to give it a go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCNqYLGwqxU

17 hours later or so - with plenty left to go - it's fair to say said hype is entirely justified. The setup is surreal - you are a blobperson on an 'island of wisdom' rolling sausages across grills to cook them - but it proves a gateway to some of the most virtuosic game design I have ever encountered. It's like The Witness in one sense (simple but complex mechanics; mysterious island etc...), but even purer - stripped of nearly all but the fundamental brilliance of the puzzles themselves.

The game starts challenging and stays that way. New mechanics and rules - from new rolling mechanics to multi-storey puzzles - are introduced and expected to be mastered almost immediately. There's no overt explanation of these rules, just brilliantly designed self-contained puzzles that encourage the player to learn and experiment. And yet the basic mechanics - simple movement and idiosyncratic turning (the avatar has a very physical, important presence in the world) - never change: new obstacles and possibilities just expand their potential wonderfully.

To say much more would be to ruin the sense of discovery - it's really figuring out how everything works for yourself, and the sense of satisfaction in doing so is immense. It's a hard game, but an endlessly rewarding one that is always fair and consistent - the hints and solution are always embedded into the puzzle design itself, you just usually need to come at them from a different angle than you're led to expect. I've been playing this during and after the excellent Dark Souls 3, and this is noticeably more inspired and surprising.

It won't be long before you will confidently be tackling initially seemingly insurmountable towers of sausages - and that's only in the second world

The_Valeyard

In Soviet Russia, sausage rolls you.

Retr0gamer

This looks like it will drive me insane. Dying for a good puzzler and considering how disappointing the witness was this looks like it will fill the gap.

seems to me that this would work well as a mobile game.
hopefully that happens sometime.

johnny_ultimate

glasso wrote: »

seems to me that this would work well as a mobile game.
hopefully that happens sometime.

It would work as a mobile game, even if I don't see the controls being quite as precise on touch screen. It is just movement and turning, so it could be adapted though.

Biggest obstacle to mobile I think is how it's priced at the moment. It's being sold at a reasonably premium price because it's a surprisingly massive game, and I can't see Lavelle undermining that with a much cheaper mobile version (because a 25 quid game on mobile is almost astronomical pricing). Perhaps in a year or two when the price has reduced somewhat

K.O.Kiki

Literally looks like shít though :pac:

johnny_ultimate

Audibly said '**** yes!' when I solved one officially fiendish later game puzzle earlier.

Then spent an hour on an another one that pretty much had my mind melted by time I had to retire for the night.

I ****ing love it. Play this game.