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”Thinky puzzle games” is a specific subgenre and community, revolving mostly around variations of sokoban, but really has an appetite for any game that deeply explores how a few mechanics can be combined and lead to interesting consequences.

Same reaction - I love puzzle games (The Witness, Talos principle, Blue Prince, Myst series, Baba is You, Antichamber, Obra Dinn, Opus Magnum etc), but haven't heard of this. I guess I should give it a try!

> After reading the linked article, and the comments here I still have zero clue about the game

A video is worth a thousand words, and there's a video at the very beginning of the article. Did you watch the video?

You control a character on a grid and you have to push sausages around the grid in order to grill them (some of the floor tiles are grill tiles). That's the core game. But the sausages roll and you can't let a given side touch a grill more than once. And the grid is space constrained - you can accidentally push a sausage off the grid and it will fall into an abyss and you have to start over. The puzzles are very difficult because there is so much complexity that stacks:

- Your character can strafe and push things, but your character is also 2 tiles wide and can pivot and swing a fork (and the swing action can push things)

- sausages only roll along one axis, otherwise they slide

- sausages can be stacked into the 3rd dimension which means there's also gravity

- if a sausage falls on your character's head you can move it around and rotate it

- etc.

The game is about rolling sausages over grills to cook them on both sides. However, that's completely unrelated to why it's so acclaimed.

This game introduces a very small set of controls and mechanics (you basically only have the arrow keys, and initially can just move around), and combines it with minimally small, yet surprisingly hard puzzles. Every puzzles is distilled to its smallest form, and involves a genuinely satisfying eureka moment.

The game then explores every possible hidden way to use the minimal set of mechanics introduced, before introducing a new mechanic (e.g. early on you'll be able to suddenly 'stab' you sausages which allows you to move them around differently. So you become a master of the game as you progress.

The problem for new players is that it's deceptively difficult to solve even the simplest puzzles + it encourages you to explore and learn how things work instead of giving you hints. This makes inexperienced players abandon it way before it fully reveals itself (which takes many hours into the game).

What I suggest is if you are new and are frustrated, find a Youtuber that solved it so that you can look at what they did. This way you won't get stuck to the point of leaving it, while still allowing you to fully enjoy it.

The problem is, the ways that it's great are hard to put into words and explain for someone unfamiliar with the game. At least, not in a succinct way. At the most basic level it's just block pushing puzzles ("Sokoban").

Sokoban is a common word within puzzle game fans and devs. That article wasn't written for people that didn't like those kinds of puzzles in the first place.

> It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is, without using niche words like "sokoban".

Sure, sure. Here's the annotated second paragraph from TFA:

  When game designer <Stephen Lavelle> [0] (Increpare Games) released Stephen's Sausage Roll back in April 2016, it was accompanied by <a trailer> [1] that showed almost nothing about the game, yet word still spread quickly. Puzzle developers and fans praised the game for its impeccable design, teasing out layers of deep puzzling and mind-expanding discoveries from so few puzzle elements. It was also renowned for its uncompromising, yet always fair, difficulty curve, with immensely challenging puzzles from the very start. These sentiments are still held to this day, as this beloved sausage-pushing sokoban continues to influence new generations of puzzle developers, <inspiring some of the best sokoban games> [3] ever made and introducing "Sausage-likes” to the puzzle vernacular.

  Sokoban games, also known as block-pushing or box-pushing games, are turn-based puzzle games in which you control a character pushing or moving objects around on a grid. The genre has origins in the 1982 game Sokoban, designed by Hiroyuki Imabayashi, in which you have to push boxes around a warehouse onto designated targets. The japanese word 倉庫番 (“sōkoban”) translates to “warehouse keeper”.

  Learn more about Stephen's Sausage Roll in <our database of thinky games> [4], where you can also find <similar games> [5] and some of the <best sokoban games ever made>. [3]

[0] <https://increpare.com/>

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCNqYLGwqxU>

[3] <https://thinkygames.com/lists/best-sokoban-games/>

[4] <https://thinkygames.com/games/stephens-sausage-roll/>

[5] <https://thinkygames.com/games/stephens-sausage-roll/similar/>

Almost anybody who grew up with video games in the 80s played Sokoban and knows exactly what that refers to. It was THE puzzle game in the early days of video games... that and maybe millipede.

> It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is

And even more if figuring out how to buy it wasn't a challenging puzzle in its own right.

Overall, I probably agree that Baba is You is a better game, but I think what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll receive so much praise is that the puzzle design is incredibly tight. It's a very straightforward concept and the core mechanic does not change between the first and the last level. But the puzzles are expertly crafted in a way that as you progress through the game you naturally come across situations where you think you know everything about the game and then it surprises you with a new mechanic that you did not expect.

Baba is You ramps up as you go to, but the ramping up is mostly done by the game giving you new tools to work with. Plus, the amount of interesting puzzles you can do with the mechanics of Baba is You is virtually endless, whereas SSG makes you feel like the game squeezed all the possible gameplay out of moving sausages around.

SSR walked so Baba could run

In favor of SSR: The design is more vertical than Baba, it explores fewer mechanics but with greater depth. And it's entirely spatial, whereas Baba's solutions are sometimes a matter of wordplay, with the sokoban just a formality.

I like Baba better, but I'm not sure if it's the better game.

I love Portal, but it feels more like a tutorial than a puzzle game, because the tolerances on each solution are so large.

It's a fantastic game, one of the all-time greats, and there are tricky parts to execute, but it's not particularly challenging in terms of puzzling.

Portal is incredibly basic in its puzzles. There's barely any challenge even in the second game. Stephen's Sausage Rolls pushes its basic mechanics to the absolute limits and made me think significantly harder than Portal ever did. Not that Portal is a bad game mind you but it's not very deep as a puzzle game

I always felt Deadly Rooms of Death (my preferred version being the free "Architect's Edition", but all are good, and many have better QoL features) was one of the puzzle games which was essentially "discovered" rather than invented.

Simple turn-based eight-direction grid movement, where one of your adjacent squares contains your "sword" and you can rotate your sword around yourself one square per-turn. Kill (deterministic and 1hp) monsters by moving your sword on to all the monsters move after your move, and "complete" a room by killing all monsters.

There's quite an active community (at least there was when I was in to it) but I've rarely heard it mentioned outside of the community.

Edit: I'm happy to see some other references to DroD in this thread.

A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and A Monster's Expedition are games in the same genre with much better presentation than Sausage Roll.

Exactly, I am quite surprised by this thread. I always thought sokobans were just one of the niches of puzzle games (one that I am not quite a fan of, to be honest... I find it just okay.)

Tunic is such an incredible experience. If you ever enjoyed the original Zelda and its manual, you simply must play tunic. It captures something incredible. And it has some amazing twists.

I believe he is Irish.

Perhaps modern AAA games have become so handholdy that any game that shuts up long enough to allow the player to experience a sense of genuine exploration and wonder counts as a puzzle game, in which case I'd recommend the rich genre of indie Kings Field-likes, e.g. Lunacid. A bit further out would be something like Moonring (Ultima-like) or Caves of Qud.

Not OP, but I've had the same conclusion. It's a bit cheeky to call it a puzzle game, but I don't think it's strictly wrong.

Imo it's better to approach Demon's Souls as an exploration puzzle game with RPG stuff and combat, not as an action RPG (such as Dark Souls 3).

"The Witness" was fine but I found its overly pompous philosophizing unbearable and pretentious. Rather play "Taiji" instead, which is clearly inspired by TW, but without the grandstanding, and at least IMHO, the puzzles are also better.

I find TW to be excruciatingly boring.

Personally, I had wanted a new Myst, and The Witness wasn't that, and so I was a bit disappointed. Obduction was released a year or two later and it was similar to the Myst I remember from my childhood and it was also a good game. I strongly recommend it.

That said, The Witness isn't a bad game as such, though the puzzles do get a bit repetitive in my opinion. I prefer more variety rather than hyper focus on one type of puzzles.

Might as well add The Talos Principle then

The witness was fine, but The Looker was much better.

Recursed is really fantastic. There's puzzles in there that took a few days for me to solve

If we're talking about recursion, Patrick's Parabox is another stellar pick.

Metroid, Half-Life, and Demon's Souls I would take issue with, but I've always considered Zelda a puzzle game, and I never questioned it until now.

I suppose the new Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom titles are more action-oriented, but everything in the mold of Ocarina of Time is a puzzle game with some light combat sprinkled on top.

Well Zelda games consistently feature block-pushing puzzles so I guess Baba Is Zelda.

you might want to have a gander at https://store.steampowered.com/app/207570/English_Country_Tu... (there's a mac/iphone[0] version, not sure if it still works on newer versions of macs tho).

[0]http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/english-country-tune/id476962...

i so badly want to spoil the story of stephen's sausage roll for you. i feel bad even spoiling that there is a story. play it.

Perhaps a more direct relation: most of those preexisting games were made in puzzlescript, which (per the article) was also made by the author of Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

Blow originally did Order of Sinking Star as a quick side project. He thought that by using these pre-existing games as a starting point, he'd get it done quicker. But then he decided to experiment with the combinatorics of these mechanics that the game blew up so much in scope that the original starting point didn't help at all.