alt Hacker News10 years: Stephen's Sausage Roll still one of the most influential puzzle games
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I completely understand how this game is brilliant and a perfect puzzle game. But it was so hard and frustrating I could not play it.
My list of must play puzzle games is far too short: Portal, Portal 2, Demon’s Souls, and Baba is You. It’s amazing to me that I’ve never heard of a game this lauded.
> most influential puzzle games ever
Never heard of it.
No shade thrown, but I always preferred my game with some amount of story or artistic ambition beyond mere puzzling.
I'd take Void Stranger or probably even Deadly Rooms of Death: The Second Sky over Stephen's Sausage Roll any day, I imagine.
It's a perfect game.
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.
FYI it's on sale on Steam today: $5.99
Is this what Jonathan Blow is trying to copy with Sinking Star?
Kula world was and always will be my favourite of these sort of games. Simple yet really challenging.
Good sokoban, but maybe my fastest rage/impatience quit on a puzzle game at 10-ish hours. I find it too difficult.
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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.