Stephen's Sausage Roll is my favorite puzzle game. But more interestingly -- it's a near-universal opinion within puzzle communities that SSR is one of the all-time best. I've never heard of such a strong consensus in other subgenres of game.
Unlike other consensus "bests", it's relatively unknown to the public (which is understandable for many reasons). It's very likely that if you're a puzzle game devotee, you will fall in love with SSR; but at the same time, if you don't have experience with puzzle games, you'll very likely hate it.
As a result, I've always thought it's an interesting window into how we value "taste" and "mastery", how too much mastery can actually distance us from one another, and what meaning there is in designing games for an ideal world shaped around ourselves, versus the world we actually live in.
It's well-known that puzzle games sell badly on Steam, and I think part of that is that difficulty and struggle is an acquired taste. Most try to paper over that gap with nice soundtracks and graphics, "hooky" mechanics, and narrative. SSR is so interesting because it contrasts so violently: it's ascetic, has no obvious hook, and offers nothing but difficulty and struggle, and the best feeling in the world if you decide to push through it anyway.
Some of my favorites are puzzle games but I guess I’m not a member of the "community" (is there a message board?) and I’m surprised to hear there's any consensus on anything- my experience has been that most puzzle fans have a very specific subgenre they enjoy rather than enjoying "puzzle games" as a whole. I've had such little luck finding new games I enjoy that I don't pay any attention to puzzle game recommendations u less it reminds me of a specific game I already like. I've played several games in this genre (didn't know it had a name!) and they are very much not my thing.
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!
Very similar taste in games, and I had heard of it but wrote it off as a simple puzzle game, kind of in the mobile-game-esque throwaway genre. I must have been mistaken.
”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.
It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is, without using niche words like "sokoban". The article talks about how the trailer for it didn't really show anything about the game either, which arguably gets you into pretentious/artistic territory.
After reading the linked article, and the comments here I still have zero clue about the game. It's a puzzle game involving sausages and a large fork does nothing to describe what kind of puzzles they might be.
> 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
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.
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.
Puzzles involving pushing blocks around a grid, where most of the challenge comes from the constrained motion. Blocks might get stuck if you push them into a corner, for example. It might be necessary to move things in a certain order, which isn't obvious at first.
"Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper". The original game was about moving boxes around in a crowded warehouse.
Being familiar with the concept isn't the same as being familiar with the term. The point that was being made by the parent comment that originally mentioned the term was that the game does not do a good job describing what it actually is to people who aren't already familiar with it. People who have never played a game in their life will know what the words "real", "time", and "strategy" mean, so I don't know how you can claim that it's anywhere close to the same thing.
Knowing what the word "strategy" means doesn't tell you anything about what a "real-time strategy game" is.
Even knowing what a "strategy game" is won't help, since the meaning of that term has shifted since "RTS" was derived from it.
Similarly, knowing that Sokoban means "warehouse guard" doesn't help you to know what to expect in a Sokoban game. But the fact that this is a common term familiar to ~everyone does.
When everyone around you is using a word with no problems, don't complain that you wish they'd all forget what it meant. Learn how to talk.
> When everyone around you is using a word with no problems, don't complain that you wish they'd all forget what it meant. Learn how to talk.
Literally this whole discussion started because someone else didn't know what it meant. No one said you should forget what it means, just that it's helpful to explain to other people so that they also will understand it in the future. Most people learn by asking questions and getting answers that explain things to them. The best way to get people not to learn is to incentivize them not to ask questions, which is exactly what you're doing by saying things like this.
> Literally this whole discussion started because someone else didn't know what it meant. No one said you should forget what it means
If you scroll up, you'll see that the discussion started when someone suggested that either the publisher, or the reviewer, should avoid "niche words like sokoban".
If we think they were talking about the review, that's pure nonsense; this is a review on "thinkygames.com".
If we think they were talking about the publisher, they're correct in spirit, but the advice to avoid not-actually-niche words like "Sokoban" is dead wrong. The publisher's page is intentionally uninformative. The description contains no information and the gameplay video contains no gameplay. I'd have to agree that that's an artistic choice that won't help to sell the game.
On the other hand, the user-defined tags on Steam aren't subject to that artistic choice, and they tell you right up front that this is a Sokoban game. That's how the game's player base describes the game. It's the only way they describe the game - the other popular tags are "puzzle", "indie", "difficult", singleplayer", and "cooking".
The advice "try not to let the people who'd be interested in your game know what it's about" is terrible advice.
(Tangent: I checked the user-defined tags for some other big games on Steam. Mostly they're extremely accurate. In one case, Vampire Survivors, the tags aren't very informative. But in that case, the video prominently displays a review quote that says "like popping bubble wrap to sick beats", which is an excellent description of the game.)
> 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.
Clicking link [3] leads us to a page that has this as its first paragraph:
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”.
Incidentally, link [3] is repeated in the final paragraph of TFA, which I will also copy and annotate:
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]
Link [4] is pretty clear about what the game is. Did you bother to click it in order to "[l]earn more about Stephen's Sausage Roll", as it invites you to do?
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.
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.
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.
All of the critically acclaimed puzzle games seem to be sokobans. I have no idea why sokoban is so popular; I find it very tedious to move blocks around manually, especially if I already know the solution and I'm just making it happen. For me games like Artisan of Glimmith, LOK Digital, Tiling Town and Lingo are the most fun, followed by deductive games like The Roottrees Are Dead and The Case of the Golden Idol.
>All of the critically acclaimed puzzle games seem to be sokobans
Wouldn't really agree considering:
Antichamber, The Witness, Talos Principle, Manifold Garden, Portal, Zachtronics, Tunic, Blue Prince, Return of the Obra Dinn, Seance of Blake Manor, a bunch more I could list.
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.
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.)
A good sokoban should not be busy-work. Well designed puzzles should be pithy and not require a lot of running around. The distance between discovering the solution and executing it should be very short.
That must be a specific niche. I enjoy puzzle games and the only sokoban game I can think of is Baba Is You. Though many games, including games that are not primarily puzzle games have a sokoban-like puzzle at some point.
The puzzle game that reaped all the rewards this year is Blue Prince, it has its sokoban moment, but as a whole it is definitely not a sokoban game.
Stephen's Sausage Roll, Can of Wormholes, Patrick's Parabox, A Monster's Expedition (and spin-offs), Baba is You, Void Stranger, Isles of Sea and Sky, Maxwell's Puzzling Demon. All of these are highly reknowned.
By "critically acclaimed games" I should clarify I mean games acclaimed for their mechanics and general mind blowingness. For whatever reason sokoban enables some crazy logic stuff that is harder to find in other puzzle games.
Two recommendations for puzzle lovers that like more open ended challenges:
Deadly Rooms of Death has same movement style as SSR. It is amazing series of games each with unique mechanics. It often evokes that feeling of being in active communication with puzzle author through evolving level design.
I've also enjoyed Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, a recently released gem. It is completely opposite of SSR, with how broadly you can approach the puzzles depending on which spells you have available (with many parts becoming too easy if you postpone them). Many games design their puzzles with a single solution. Rhell takes approach of "you cannot pass here, let's see you try" which is a fun spin on the genre. I also enjoyed how you gain abilities through game. In many modern games you unlock higher jumping by collecting skill points and spending them on skill tree. Here the same ability is emergently and organically incorporated into game mechanics. Over the playthrough the player collects new spell runes; at one point you gain rune to apply the spells to yourself. By assigning a combo strong-raise-on-self to a hotkey, you empower the character with the higher jump ability and stop using the normal jump. There's all kind of crazy and innovative ideas in there and the entire game is delightful.
Surprised nobody mentioned Fish Fillets 2, which is a top 3 puzzle game imho.
My list:
1. Antichamber
2. Fish Fillets 2
3. Baba is You
4. Ittle Dew (esp. the Master Dungeon)
5. An Architect's Adventure
6. Cosmic Express
7. Talos Principle
8. Stephen's Sausage Roll
9. Portal
10. Cocoon
Fish Fillets 2 looks simple, but it's one of the toughest puzzle games out there. Especially getting the stars on each level. I love it because the rules are simple, everything's there on one screen, but figuring it out requires a lot of out of the box thinking.
Not surprised, he’s a friend whom I watched build the game over a few years in the 2010s. He was EXTREMELY thorough in the playtesting, it set such an unrealistic expectations for me with games I play now
My list of must play puzzle games is far too short: Portal, Portal 2, Demon’s Souls, and Baba is You. It’s amazing to me that I’ve never heard of a game this lauded.
It's a puzzle maker's puzzle game. The reason why it's so lauded is because the design is so tight. Kinda like how there's certain buildings the public thinks is ugly, but architects all like it because it tickles that part of the architect brain. It's a game that gives you that ah-ha moment. Kinda that moment where you walk from the forest into a clearing, but for your brain.
The game is hard. I only kinda got the hang of it, and I didn't quite get to that ah-ha moment. You have to be willing to sit with it and think. I think with sokoban games, you can often just almost random walk your way to a solution, because the state space and its transitions is easy enough to wander into. But I didn't find that to be the case with SSR. You have to be able to reason about the state space changes, I think because the state space isn't exactly euclidean, so it's harder to wander into the solution.
Prepare yourself to get inundated with recommendations. Antichamber, Tunic, Talos Principle, Blue Prince, Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, Superliminal, literally every Zachtronics game (most especially Opus Magnum)...
I don't think I've ever heard of Demon's Souls being categorized as a puzzle game. I suppose some of the bosses have a trick to figure out? But I'd still think it falls into the action RPG genre by a wide margin.
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.
"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.
The Witness is one of my favorite games of all time, but yeah the first thing I say to anyone thinking of playing it is to skip all the audio logs. Those things are straight up embarrassing trash and I can understand anyone unfortunate enough to click on them dropping the game down into "don't recommend" territory. Also, given his extremely stinky personality, I probably won't be buying any future games by Blow.
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.
Interesting, I had passed it by when I heard it had a time limit and reset mechanic (not unlike Zelda Majora's Mask). I hated that mechanic in Majora's Mask (and I never finished that game), it made the game feel stressful to me.
I prefer games where I can play slow and deliberate. If there is a time mechanic it should be turn based, not real time. (Or it should be a very short time based system such as "run across the room to hit the other button, the cost of failing is 10 seconds of trying again, not 10 minutes".)
I would normally agree with you about time pressure, but Outer Wilds worked for me even so. In Outer Wilds I found the time loop liberating.
By construction, nothing in the game is far away. You're only limited by how much you've figured out. And having the spark of understanding occur can take place at any time, including while you're away from the keyboard.
So it's mostly about following your curiosity wherever it leads you, and from there you keep digging all the way, safe in the knowledge that in 22 minutes at most any screwups will be rolled back. And then you can try again, or, better follow your curiosity somewhere else. There's no lack of things to figure out, and some of them are completely optional. But... Figure them out anyway, the reward is worthwhile.
Outer wilds definitely has stressful parts (it is also a horror game even though it doesn't wear the normal aesthetics of one), but generally the time pressure is not a major issue: the game even pauses while you're reading text so you can mull over things at your own pace.
I know exactly what you mean by Majora’s Mask. Ugh. I spent all that time getting here and now I’m out of time and it resets?!
I can see why Outer Wilds might feel the same way. But somehow it didn’t for me. Probably because it really doesn’t take much at all to get right back to where you were.
Try the RHEM series. It's Myst, but harder, complete with slideshow of late 90's 3D graphics environment. I liked Obduction, but I found it a bit too easy.
The remakes of Myst and Riven are beautiful. I don’t play many AAA games nowadays and my expectation of photorealism is about 10 years old. I was surprised at how well it runs on an M1.
Have you tried Blue Prince? It's got some similarities (it's basically Myst + a spatial puzzle + modern drafting/resource management board game).
And you don't have the time element of Outer Wilds (Outer Wilds is brilliant though, and it kinda needs that time element to work properly).
I mean technically it does in that you only have so many steps in a day, but you only spend a step moving from one room to another, so you can take your time in any given room, and you have ways to increase those steps.
Also you're more likely to block yourself off with your room layout for the day than you are to run out of steps, at least once you start getting better at the game (it can happen though).
I think The Looker might appeal both to those who loved The Witness and those who didn’t. Several laugh-out-loud moments, some fun puzzles of its own - a wonderfully silly send-up, and free, too.
if we're going to plug random puzzle games on this thread, IMO the most underdiscussed puzzle game of all time is Recursed, the only game i've played which properly explores recursion as a mechanic, and (MINOR SPOILER) the only game i've played which detects when you have created logical contradictions, and for each contradiction you achieve rewards you with a secret bonus level.
Routing games like Mini Metro/Motorways, Freeways, and Fly Corp are not quite puzzle games in the traditional sense, but I'd definitely encourage any puzzle fans to try them.
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.
I was being a bit silly but the Souls series do have a metroidvania angle to them. Also each enemy, especially the bosses, are small puzzles where you figure out how they work and then how to overcome them.
The boxing in (Mike Tyson's) Punch-Out!! is so cartoony and abstract that it's been described as not really a boxing game, but a puzzle game that involves throwing punches.
I wish that Opera Omnia, also by Stephen Lavelle, got more attention. It is mind-blowing exploration of the idea of propaganda and revisionist history, which somehow also manages to be engaging and fun, with an incredibly unique core mechanic.
If you or anyone else reading this haven’t finished Stephen’s Sausage Roll to the very end, including reading all the story book paragraphs along the way (which increase in poignancy and frequency as the game winds to a close) then I strongly encourage you to do so. No spoilers!
I love pure puzzles and completed SSR. The story consists of sign plaques that narrate the history of the fictional world, and how your player character fulfills their place in the world through the main goal of cooking sausages. A bit unique and interesting, though not particularly complex, and you can guess the twist before it reveals. In other words, a puzzle game with a short story interspersed, perhaps 99% puzzles and 1% reading. The music consists of relaxing algorithmic ambience. The artistic ambition aims for surrealism and minimalism. I like it a lot, but I recommend against it for you.
I’m good with zero-story puzzle games. I’ve spent many hours in Simon Tathem’s Puzzles [1] on my iPhone, just for the 100% pure logic goodness that they are.
Do yourself a favor, if you haven't yet: go in the instructions for the games you like and find out the original game's name (for example' "Light Up" is actually called Akari), go online and find hand-crafted puzzles for that game. I love that Simon Tatham's Puzzles exists, but nothing beats hand-crafted puzzles made by good designers. There's a sense of purpose in the order you discover the solution and some "eureka!" moments that randomly generated puzzles will never give you!
The video has lots of helpful information for puzzle game design. I have started to incorporate some of that knowledge into my own puzzle game https://qcgeneral29.itch.io/lets-learn
This is more or less my take, but at least for me it's not about the level of difficulty exactly. It just feels very transparently like exploring a state space, where the "a-ha" moments just boil down to breaking into a different neighborhood of that space. To be clear, the puzzles are very well designed, and also very hard; but I don't find solving them satisfying at ALL. Compare with Baba Is You, where the "a-ha"s feel to me more like having a grand insight than finding the right very specific sequence of moves.
Put another way, it's been years since I played Baba and I can still remember the key insights to some of the sneakier puzzles. I couldn't even begin to do that for SSR.
That's my verdict on Stephen's Sausage Roll too. My personal favorite sokoban is Patrick's Parabox (the name is an obvious nod to SSR) because its puzzles have a gentler and finer-grained difficulty ramp.
Trying to copy is a bit harsh, but he has credited it as an inspiration for what's possible within the Sokoban format. I believe he was a playtester for SSR before it released, mid The Witness development.
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.
Oost does incorporate elements that were tried in a puzzlescript game “mirror isle” and sean t barret’s “promesst”. Dont think anything directly from this sausage one.
Copy, certainly not. But Blow was an enthusiastic promoter of the game when it came out and held it out as a standard of excellence in puzzle game design.
Unlike other consensus "bests", it's relatively unknown to the public (which is understandable for many reasons). It's very likely that if you're a puzzle game devotee, you will fall in love with SSR; but at the same time, if you don't have experience with puzzle games, you'll very likely hate it.
As a result, I've always thought it's an interesting window into how we value "taste" and "mastery", how too much mastery can actually distance us from one another, and what meaning there is in designing games for an ideal world shaped around ourselves, versus the world we actually live in.
It's well-known that puzzle games sell badly on Steam, and I think part of that is that difficulty and struggle is an acquired taste. Most try to paper over that gap with nice soundtracks and graphics, "hooky" mechanics, and narrative. SSR is so interesting because it contrasts so violently: it's ascetic, has no obvious hook, and offers nothing but difficulty and struggle, and the best feeling in the world if you decide to push through it anyway.
After reading the linked article, and the comments here I still have zero clue about the game. It's a puzzle game involving sausages and a large fork does nothing to describe what kind of puzzles they might be.
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.
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.
"Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper". The original game was about moving boxes around in a crowded warehouse.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5758783607eaa0...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlockPuzzle
Complaining that games may be described as "like Sokoban" is kind of like complaining that they might be described as "real-time strategy".
Even knowing what a "strategy game" is won't help, since the meaning of that term has shifted since "RTS" was derived from it.
Similarly, knowing that Sokoban means "warehouse guard" doesn't help you to know what to expect in a Sokoban game. But the fact that this is a common term familiar to ~everyone does.
When everyone around you is using a word with no problems, don't complain that you wish they'd all forget what it meant. Learn how to talk.
Literally this whole discussion started because someone else didn't know what it meant. No one said you should forget what it means, just that it's helpful to explain to other people so that they also will understand it in the future. Most people learn by asking questions and getting answers that explain things to them. The best way to get people not to learn is to incentivize them not to ask questions, which is exactly what you're doing by saying things like this.
If you scroll up, you'll see that the discussion started when someone suggested that either the publisher, or the reviewer, should avoid "niche words like sokoban".
If we think they were talking about the review, that's pure nonsense; this is a review on "thinkygames.com".
If we think they were talking about the publisher, they're correct in spirit, but the advice to avoid not-actually-niche words like "Sokoban" is dead wrong. The publisher's page is intentionally uninformative. The description contains no information and the gameplay video contains no gameplay. I'd have to agree that that's an artistic choice that won't help to sell the game.
On the other hand, the user-defined tags on Steam aren't subject to that artistic choice, and they tell you right up front that this is a Sokoban game. That's how the game's player base describes the game. It's the only way they describe the game - the other popular tags are "puzzle", "indie", "difficult", singleplayer", and "cooking".
The advice "try not to let the people who'd be interested in your game know what it's about" is terrible advice.
(Tangent: I checked the user-defined tags for some other big games on Steam. Mostly they're extremely accurate. In one case, Vampire Survivors, the tags aren't very informative. But in that case, the video prominently displays a review quote that says "like popping bubble wrap to sick beats", which is an excellent description of the game.)
Sure, sure. Here's the annotated second paragraph from TFA:
Clicking link [3] leads us to a page that has this as its first paragraph: Incidentally, link [3] is repeated in the final paragraph of TFA, which I will also copy and annotate: Link [4] is pretty clear about what the game is. Did you bother to click it in order to "[l]earn more about Stephen's Sausage Roll", as it invites you to do?[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/>
And even more if figuring out how to buy it wasn't a challenging puzzle in its own right.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/353540/Stephens_Sausage_R...
On sale for 6$ at 80% off.
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.
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.
rolled, surely
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.
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.
Wouldn't really agree considering:
Antichamber, The Witness, Talos Principle, Manifold Garden, Portal, Zachtronics, Tunic, Blue Prince, Return of the Obra Dinn, Seance of Blake Manor, a bunch more I could list.
The puzzle game that reaped all the rewards this year is Blue Prince, it has its sokoban moment, but as a whole it is definitely not a sokoban game.
By "critically acclaimed games" I should clarify I mean games acclaimed for their mechanics and general mind blowingness. For whatever reason sokoban enables some crazy logic stuff that is harder to find in other puzzle games.
Deadly Rooms of Death has same movement style as SSR. It is amazing series of games each with unique mechanics. It often evokes that feeling of being in active communication with puzzle author through evolving level design.
I've also enjoyed Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, a recently released gem. It is completely opposite of SSR, with how broadly you can approach the puzzles depending on which spells you have available (with many parts becoming too easy if you postpone them). Many games design their puzzles with a single solution. Rhell takes approach of "you cannot pass here, let's see you try" which is a fun spin on the genre. I also enjoyed how you gain abilities through game. In many modern games you unlock higher jumping by collecting skill points and spending them on skill tree. Here the same ability is emergently and organically incorporated into game mechanics. Over the playthrough the player collects new spell runes; at one point you gain rune to apply the spells to yourself. By assigning a combo strong-raise-on-self to a hotkey, you empower the character with the higher jump ability and stop using the normal jump. There's all kind of crazy and innovative ideas in there and the entire game is delightful.
My list:
Fish Fillets 2 looks simple, but it's one of the toughest puzzle games out there. Especially getting the stars on each level. I love it because the rules are simple, everything's there on one screen, but figuring it out requires a lot of out of the box thinking.- Patrick's Parabox
- Blue Prince
The game is hard. I only kinda got the hang of it, and I didn't quite get to that ah-ha moment. You have to be willing to sit with it and think. I think with sokoban games, you can often just almost random walk your way to a solution, because the state space and its transitions is easy enough to wander into. But I didn't find that to be the case with SSR. You have to be able to reason about the state space changes, I think because the state space isn't exactly euclidean, so it's harder to wander into the solution.
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).
Haven't played Taiji, I'll give it a shot.
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.
I prefer games where I can play slow and deliberate. If there is a time mechanic it should be turn based, not real time. (Or it should be a very short time based system such as "run across the room to hit the other button, the cost of failing is 10 seconds of trying again, not 10 minutes".)
By construction, nothing in the game is far away. You're only limited by how much you've figured out. And having the spark of understanding occur can take place at any time, including while you're away from the keyboard.
So it's mostly about following your curiosity wherever it leads you, and from there you keep digging all the way, safe in the knowledge that in 22 minutes at most any screwups will be rolled back. And then you can try again, or, better follow your curiosity somewhere else. There's no lack of things to figure out, and some of them are completely optional. But... Figure them out anyway, the reward is worthwhile.
"Thank you for remembering me."
I can see why Outer Wilds might feel the same way. But somehow it didn’t for me. Probably because it really doesn’t take much at all to get right back to where you were.
And you don't have the time element of Outer Wilds (Outer Wilds is brilliant though, and it kinda needs that time element to work properly).
I mean technically it does in that you only have so many steps in a day, but you only spend a step moving from one room to another, so you can take your time in any given room, and you have ways to increase those steps.
Also you're more likely to block yourself off with your room layout for the day than you are to run out of steps, at least once you start getting better at the game (it can happen though).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/
I guess Zelda, Metroid and Half-Life also count as puzzle games then. :)
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.
Sorry Mario, but your princess is another castle!
This one? It looks interesting but definitely a lot less visible than SSR and not on storefronts or etc, right?
I'd take Void Stranger or probably even Deadly Rooms of Death: The Second Sky over Stephen's Sausage Roll any day, I imagine.
de•li•cious saus•ag•es
I’m good with zero-story puzzle games. I’ve spent many hours in Simon Tathem’s Puzzles [1] on my iPhone, just for the 100% pure logic goodness that they are.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simon-tathams-puzzles/id622220...
[0]http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/english-country-tune/id476962...
I've seen this game recommended many times but I've never played it because I feel like I would get bored very fast. Same with Zachtronics games.
https://youtu.be/85mAmP4k1Co?si=yuxpJ2xhkH7r_eo3
The video has lots of helpful information for puzzle game design. I have started to incorporate some of that knowledge into my own puzzle game https://qcgeneral29.itch.io/lets-learn
Never heard of it.
Put another way, it's been years since I played Baba and I can still remember the key insights to some of the sneakier puzzles. I couldn't even begin to do that for SSR.
Huh, I've seen both games (though both are very fringe to my overall experience) and didn't make that connection.
From this post by one of the original devs: https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...