The Stack

Day 2 of playing Stephen’s Sausage Roll found me getting through puzzles much more quickly and smoothly than day 1. I definitely think that taking a break and sleeping on it had a positive effect here. Sometimes that’s what it takes for unfamiliar rules to sink in. One of the first things that you have to get used to in this game is that you have to walk backward a lot of the time, because otherwise your fork gets in the way. At this point, I’m doing that as a matter of course. Where I would previously look at a puzzle for the first time with pure bafflement, now I’m capable of at least identifying goals — this sausage has to go there, etc. — due to my better understanding of how sausages behave.

The game seems to be gated by periodic obstacles such that you have to finish all the puzzles in one section before proceeding to the next. The second section introduces the notion of height. In section 1, the only natural obstacles were grills and gaps in the terrain. In section 2, there are walls, which you can push sausages against to impale them on your fork, then pull them off against another wall. This means there’s a whole new mechanism for the puzzles to explore, but for my part, I find its implications fairly intuitive. Where each puzzle in section 1 was a struggle, to be tried and abandoned and revisited, I’ve completed all but two of the puzzles in section 2 on my first attempt.

Essentially, there are two mechanics that needed to be introduced to the player, one that’s hard to grasp and one that’s easy to grasp. But the hard one had to be introduced first, because it’s the basic movement mechanics. I suppose that subsequent sections will add further complications, as is customary in puzzle games. Given what’s happened so far, I have no idea whether they’ll make things easier or harder than what I’ve seen.