Ever since being delightfully surprised by The Witness, my brain has been searching for another good puzzler to scratch that particular itch. I've fiddled with Quern, Haven Moon, Eyes of Ara (possible future reviews?) which are all good, but I never expected this bizarre and innocent-appearing sausage-grilling game to be the masterwork I've yearned for.

Stephen's Sausage Roll, on a surface level, appears to be a rather simple game. The graphics aren't particularly impressive, the mechanics/controls are simple and easy to understand (if a little awkward), the soundtrack is quiet, subtle but nothing special. There's no story really; you're just a little dude on a set of islands with a fork, doing your best to grill a bunch of sausages.

The game is broken up into neat little puzzles. Each puzzle is presented as an island, and you're given a number of raw sausages. The island is dotted with obstacles, grill tiles and other things. The sausages can be rolled or skewered by your fork. You push them around until each sausage is perfectly cooked (once on each side) using the grill tiles. It's similar to Sokoban in many ways, and after a while it feels so natural, so intuitive, so satisfying that one wonders why this game wasn't created decades ago for MS-DOS or early systems, sitting alongside classic puzzle games like Tetris,etc. If you burn your sausage, or knock it into the water, you've messed up, but there's thankfully an undo button to experiment with and to retrace your steps.

The game clearly looks completely different from The Witness, but at its core these two games are actually quite similar, only that Stephen's Sausage Roll is a much more stripped-down experience. Like The Witness this game presents you with one idea, some basic controls and mechanics, but then drives these components forward, pushing them to every imaginable situation and combination. As you beat each level, gradual increases in complexity are introduced, little mechanics or obstacles. Some of these levels seem absolutely impossible at first glance, and after fiddling/staring for protracted periods the solution suddenly dawns upon you, equipping you with another tool or concept which can be applied to future levels. The initially-awkward control scheme soon becomes second nature and I found myself speeding around, fork in hand, feeling like an expert grill-master. The whole game/concept is kind of stupid/surreal at first glance, but it's hard to fully appreciate the satisfaction one acquires from finally defeating one of these challenging sausage puzzles.

The game is designed so that, if you get stuck, you can go off and attempt other puzzles and come back to the thorny one later. Often puzzle games can be frustrating, but there's a strange calm about Stephen's Sausage Roll. Is it the quiet, calming music or the lapping of the ocean waves? Perhaps it's the simplicity of the interface and the graphics; there's no pressure from the a complex narrative, no big cinematic intro, no pixel-hunting: it's just you and the sausages, and it's like the game politely nudges you in the right directions but won't be offended if you put it aside for a couple days.

For a game that appears so simple and silly I've written a lot here, but that's what makes it excellent; it's so unassuming. Even the Steam page About section simply states a single 5-word line: "A simple 3d puzzle game," as though the developer is quietly winking at us, keeping his cards held close to his chest, knowing that those who investigate deeper will find the answers, and those who judge a book by its cover (or by the About page) aren't worthy of this secret meaty delight.

Ultimately, what is a puzzle game without good puzzles? What Stephen's Sausage Roll has chopped off for economy, it makes up for with ingenious puzzle design. Every level/area has been crafted with such immaculate care and a bold, creative sense of purpose. It's as though a deep narrative actually IS unfolding within, told without words, and one finds that perhaps this game isn't about grilling sausages after all..

This is one of the most tight puzzle games I've experienced. Like "The Witness" and "Baba Is You", this does a very good job at gradually adding more complexity as you progress, though not necessarily by adding new objects to interact with, but by constantly giving you different circumstances for new kinds of interactions. The whole game is fleshing out one simple idea -- evenly grilling sausage rolls -- without ever feeling like redundant padding.

Only thing I wish this game had was a short demo for people to understand the basics. For the price, I'd certainly say this game is worth it, but it's pretty easy to miss why if you haven't played it or looked into it much. As a solution to that, I'd recommend checking out Stephen's website where he whips up similarly minded puzzle games at a generous pace -- https://www.increpare.com/ (Heck, this game is considered one of them https://www.increpare.com/game/stephen-s-sausage-roll.html)

If you want to get a taste of SSR in particular, I'd recommend Karamell (https://www.increpare.com/game/karamell.html).

It doesn't exactly capture the fuller, more polished experience of SSR, but I think it works as a hint for what the game is going for. Even more-so I'd recommend just browsing around that website and trying some of his creations to get a taste of this game's spirit. (Most of them are in-browser games, so no need for downloading and file management!)

In regards to my personal experience that I had with SSR, I played this game during the cold season of December 2018, and it has done a good job at painting my memories of that time with the feelings that this game brought:

• The uniquely abstract and innocently wacky style of the game
• The minimalist but particular sound design of dreamy free-form music and clear-cut sound effects which give personality to each specific action
• Getting stumped very often, sometimes for a few days on a single puzzle, where I started to get the Tetris effect for this game's mechanics (which tbh did occasionally feel a bit like insanity for me, but all-in-all still made for a unique feeling of this game)

All to say that these feelings fit very cozily with my time bundling up to stay warm, in a new room I moved into, after experiencing a pretty hectic, "adulty", and relatively video-game-less year.

Stephen's Sausage Roll is a quirky little title, building from an incredibly strong mechanical base. The puzzles are overtly complicated, unintuitive, and yet people willing to put up with it will feel quite a few satisfying clicks in discovering how many ways to spin a sausage.

The game LOOKS very simple to start with - you are Stephen, you have a fork, and you roll sausages onto a grill. The game is split into several islands with distinct puzzle sections, with each section containing some number of sausages and a grill. Each 2x1 sausage (the game is tiled) needs grilled once and then the player must return with fork in hand to the start of the puzzle.

The game features neat mechanical extensions from that concept - stabbing, rolling, and stacking sausages all have their role to play. Even Stephen's fork presents some interesting mechanics that you won't notice at first. While this should have the makings of a classic puzzle game, the design is difficult to like. The complexity of the puzzles immediately starts with dizzying amounts of difficulty, the controls are a little tricky to get a handle on (expect many accidental moves, which makes me glad for an undo button) and the solution space is ridiculously large without much in the way of intuitive design or hints. Many a puzzle is designed to confound or frustrate, and some puzzles introduce mechanics in unnecessarily cruel and complicated ways (see: The Great Tower). While some enjoy this challenge, I found many instances where if I didn't know a general idea of what I needed to do I was blindly attempting to brute force the solution or had to look it up.

Despite the insidiously complicated design, the game is quite aesthetically pleasing to look at. Islands surrounded by water have simple pixel graphics on a variety of soft and gentle colors, and the music (with a music change button!) range from quiet ambience to unsettling ambience to... a lot of ambience. The game seems to be aurally and visually designed to be low stress in the most stressful of situations, which is at the least nice to look at and listen to.

Stephen's Sausage Roll has some surprise story later on but it's relatively minor - nothing overtly pretentious like other highly praised puzzle games, which does so in its favor. The game has puzzles that could use better ordering, design - some way to make it more fun to a larger variety of people but for now it has some very intriguing mechanics that another game could pick up to make something fantastic someday. Until then people can struggle with this one.