Stephen's Sausage Roll

This isn’t a game for everybody. It’s brutally difficult and requires incredible patience and lateral thinking. However for puzzle aficionados interested in a casual but challenging experience, Stephen’s Sausage Roll is one of the best puzzlers available.

Its concept may seem silly at first, but the latest title from prodigious indie developer Stephen Lavelle is one of the most difficult puzzle games ever made.

It's a game you'll come back to the next day, having faced constant defeat in levels that are surely impossible, and find yourself beating them. [July 2016, p.120]

It’s worth every penny.

To put it simply, Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be some of the meatiest and most delicious food for the mind you’ll taste all year.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is tough and tumbly, with a greater emphasis on one’s own form than any other puzzle game, which usually waiver the avatar as too grotesque of its gorgeous world.

Hard as Stephen's Sausage Roll is, it rewards those with an open mind; it's almost literally built for those who, as kids, couldn't help playing with their food. The difference is that the creative, outside-the-box solutions found in the game don't leave any mess at all, and their clean and ultimately clear precision is what makes this title such an appealing and rewarding puzzler.

It is one of the greatest puzzle games of all time. And by best puzzle game, I don't mean that it earned its place on some "puzzle" best-seller list that includes Tetris and Puyo Puyo and Dr. Mario (all on the same list). This is not "The room" or ", 1000000. If you're looking for something like World of Goo or Fez then keep on walking. Those are great games, but they're not what we're discussing here. This is more in the vein of Jonathan Blow, Zachtronics, DROD, Saira, Tetrabot, Great Permutator, or English Country Tune. Games that are about the mental struggle and the escalation of that challenge to ridiculous but still-achievable heights. Spatial thinking and reverse engineering solutions. Eliminating false paths and reasoning about your goals in high level concepts and then breaking down solutions to individual steps. If anyone ever composes a list of top puzzle games and doesn't include at least a few of those titles on the list you know they're talking about a different sort of game entirely. Stephen's Sausage Roll with its seemingly insurmountable challenges and the way you gradually learn, practice, and master the mechanics is so very satisfying. And each time you learn something new about the system, the game throws a new twist at you. And it does so for 40 straight hours, never ever repeating itself, and never wasting your time. It is terse and brutal and the game stands confidently among the greats. I wish I could forget I ever played it so I could do it all again.

The puzzles are incredible, but this isn't a fun game to play. At all. It's too hard!

This game is a spiritual successor of the puzzle game Sokoban, a puzzle game where you push boxes. Do you remember it? No. How about the mediocre Boxxel on the gameboy? No? Well you can see why I'm surprised when a game like Stephen's Sausage Roll lands 10/10 on numerous review sites. Yes, for a game about pushing boxes (or sausages in this case) it's well made. Possibly game of the year for "Box pushing puzzle games fanatics monthly" Magazine. Outside that narrow niche, next to other games given a perfect 10, it's laughable. Is it Super Metroid? Is it FF7? Is it even Cave Story? There's not much depth. There's no story. The levels are all similar. It's ugly. The feeling of progress and reward isn't there. Well-designed learning curve aside, it's nothing special. It's a good take on something inherently mediocre (.8 x .5 = .4). I tried reading other reviews for a taste of what's going on. What I pulled away with was this games the perfect storm of overrated. It's an indie developer creates a piece of "art" that appeals to your intellect. Another reviewer even mentioned how smart the game was and how smart he felt for playing along. Video game journalism, everyone. If you like puzzles games and have hours to devote to intellectual validation, go for it. You'll get your money worth. Just know I think you're dumb spending $30 on a back-patting machine.

This metascore rating is the reason why I only pay attention to the user score. This game is a good puzzle game.. but so is kickle cubicle. This really shouldn't be on the first page of top rated games of all time.

2000s browser game-tier experience shilled by The Guardian and other big name journos because the dev is roommates with the creator of VVVVV and Super Hexagon