On its website, developer Stephen Lavelle calls Stephen’s Sausage Roll “a simple 3D puzzle game for Windows, Mac, and Linux”. I’ve played simple puzzle games and imagined that this would be another in an overly long and depressingly shallow vein of mediocre puzzlers with barely one new trick up its practically transparent sleeve. But, while it certainly knows what it is and makes no bones about it, Stephen’s Sausage Roll isn’t your average puzzler.
This is a world filled with sausages: giant, raw, meaty sausages, waiting – with all the patience that a pork-filled intestine can muster – for someone to trot along and grill them up real nice. You take on the role of a little guy with a huge fork – we’ll call him Stephen – whose job it is to ensure that those sausages get cooked to a tee. Each puzzle presents you with a number of pork bags and a bunch of grills that you have to roll or push the sausages over in order to cook them to delicious perfection. Each sausage has four cookable surfaces on its tubular body: two on the top and two on the bottom, and grills come in a variety of configurations from lone, single-space grills to wide, flaming avenues but beware: if one part of the sausage is rolled or pushed over a grill twice, it’ll burn and you’ll fail, because no-one likes a burnt sausage (apart from my step-dad but we’ll leave that alone).
“You don’t just have to think about these puzzles – you have to rewire your brain to think around them”
The game’s design owes a lot to Minecraft but, to be honest, that’s probably more of a decision based on the need to standardise the playing area into square surfaces rather than Stephen wanting it to look like Minecraft – because Stephen’s Sausage Roll really is its own, great looking, beast (though I wouldn’t put it past an enterprising fan or two to create Minecraft skins based on it). Each puzzle area is made up of three things: land, water and grills – with sausages on top. The sausages will be ruined if they fall in the water and Stephen is massively hydrophobic and won’t go anywhere near it – nor will he take one for the team and get his feet burnt so you can cook the perfect sausage, the git. The overworld is actually made up of the individual puzzles and you’ll need to orient yourself with each ghost of Stephen to begin it. Once you’re in, you have the option to exit the puzzle to try another, restart it from the beginning and, happily, undo each move you’ve made so you can have another crack from a point of your choosing.
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