![]() ![]() You learn the set of movements needed to get a single sausage across a specific pattern of grill pads and toast it perfectly and that arms you with another piece of knowledge which you can deploy in a new puzzle, breaking something that was previously daunting into smaller move sets. ![]() ![]() That realisation opens up a new set of moves and you start to make progress. But the control system also lets you pivot around the tile you're standing on, catching the sausage with your fork as you do so. You learn that you can nudge the sausages up, down, left and right. I wandered that first island until I found a puzzle that clicked with me and I worked my way through that, pushing and pushing and undoing errant pushes. There's no tutorial, just an explanation that you use the arrow keys to move, the R key to reset and Z to undo the last move. I'd been expecting the game to be hard because of the general tone of the conversations surrounding it and the types of people who were raving about it so I wasn't sure if my brick wall was because it was a challenge impossible for most people or whether it was about not thinking in the right way. You start to see why this isn't a straightforward proposition, despite the simplicity of the idea.Īt first, I booted up the game and felt like I'd instantly hit a brick wall. You can also ruin the sausages by rolling them off the island and into the sea. Touching part of the sausage on the grill more than once burns and thus ruins the sausage. That means each sausage needs to touch a grill pad in four places to cook the top two tiles and the bottom two tiles to perfection. A grill pad will cook the underside of one tile's worth of sausage. To activate the level you orient yourself as indicated by the ghost and the rest of the scenery drops into the sea, leaving you with the relevant parts of the overworld and gigantic sausages which must be grilled to perfection on grill tiles placed around the level.Įach sausage is two tiles long and one tile wide. On the overworld map you find ghostly figures also holding forks which mark the entry point for each level. It doesn't really matter, all you need to know is that they wield a five-pronged fork and can toddle about the tiled landscape. You play as Stephen… or, I think you play as Stephen – I've seen fan art (yes, there's fan art) which has the character as a lady and one fellow journo assumed the character to be female. I am the sort of person who will happily chip away at this sort of thing over a series of evenings, disappearing into a kind of mental puzzle cave, supping on tea and munching Cadbury's fingers as I shuffle here and there, testing and resetting. To give a bit of extra guidance before the sausagey real talk: John does like puzzles but not Sokoban-style puzzles and thus has refused to play, while Adam isn't averse to puzzles but points out that he doesn't think in the right way for this kind of thing and thus would only play if someone who does enjoy them was sat next to him, making it a collaborative thing. The joy of the game, for me, also encompassed figuring those out, so if you know you like difficult, Sokoban-style puzzle games or are up for a challenge I'd say you want to stop reading this now and I suspect you will enjoy yourself. There won't be spoilers, precisely, because I'm not going to talk about the solutions to the puzzles, but I am going to talk about a few of the game's mechanics. It's worthy praise from what I've experienced so far but given that's only two islands of puzzling and I can see whole other sections tantalisingly close on the edge of my overworld map I'm going to talk about the puzzling process so far. You've probably heard sausage chat on the sausage vine over the last week as Stephen Lavelle's meaty tile-based puzzler has garnered praise from the likes of Jonathan Blow (him off The Witness and Braid) and Bennett Foddy (QWOP, GIRP). I have been doing variations of this all morning because I am stuck on the second island of Stephen's Sausage Roll. Right now I am probing cautiously at a tower of sausages occupying the centre of a little grassy patch of land. ![]()
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