Stephen's Sausage Roll

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is a sokoban-style puzzle game about grilling sausages in a strange, low poly world. The levels consist of tight grid-based rooms in which your character uses an oversized fork to roll and grill chunky sausages. Although the game technically doesn’t introduce any new mechanics over its distinct areas, its puzzles consistently reveal new, strange mechanics that were hidden in plain sight all along.

The core of Stephen’s Sausage Roll is the unusual way you control the player character and interact with the sausages. To complete a level, you must cook all the sausages on grills that lie in the ground, making sure to avoid rolling any previously cooked sausage back over a grill. Adding to the conundrum is the strange way you move within the levels. Your character holds a fork the size of their body, which causes them to take up two squares instead of one, and whenever they would move to either side, they swing their fork in that direction before being able to proceed forwards, making the movement reminiscent of tank controls. Mastering the movement and understanding how to position sausages is essential to the constrained yet fiendish puzzles.

A notable feature of Stephen’s Sausage Roll is that it technically doesn’t add new mechanics over the course of the game. Instead, it methodically unveils new ways of interacting with the game world that were hidden in plain sight, inaccessible simply because the puzzles had been finely constructed to prevent the player from discovering the interaction too early. All of these interactions are taught almost entirely without written tutorials; instead the puzzles are designed such that the player naturally stumbles upon the interactions themselves. The game received widespread critical praise, and this specific style of puzzle gameplay has gone on to influence other puzzle games such as A Monster’s Expedition and Can of Wormholes.

Though it has some narrative elements, Stephen’s Sausage Roll is a puzzle game first and foremost, and it is uncompromising in its difficulty. Not only is each puzzle consistently challenging, every puzzle must be beaten to complete the game. Specifically, while the puzzles within each world may be completed in any order, every single puzzle in each world must be completed in order to unlock the next one. There’s also no hint system whatsoever, although hint guides and walkthroughs can be found online if you’re truly stuck.

Alongside its difficult puzzles, the game does have a story. However, it’s only infrequently communicated by small pedestals that dot the landscape, and it’s also vague, strange, and goes to very unexpected places. Altogether, Stephen’s Sausage Roll presents a challenging package of finely tuned puzzles that belie unexpected depths, paired with a unique, somewhat rough-around-the-edges, visual and narrative style.

This description was written by Asher Stone and edited by Oriane Tury.