GoKawiilToday marks 10 years since Stephen's Sausage Roll released on PC and changed puzzle games forever. A sokoban game where you use an oversized fork to cook chunky sausages, it's become known for its meticulous puzzle design and tough-as-nails difficulty, winning the hearts (and minds) of puzzle-lovers and aspiring game developers. The influence that the game has had on the thinky community and the puzzle games we love is immeasurable, so here at Thinky Games, we’d like to join in the celebrations and put a party hat on for what we consider a puzzle game masterpiece.
When game designer Stephen Lavelle (Increpare Games) released Stephen's Sausage Roll back in April 2016, it was accompanied by a trailer 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 ever made and introducing "Sausage-likes” to the puzzle vernacular.
A few years prior to Stephen's Sausage Roll, Stephen Lavelle also released PuzzleScript, a web-based game engine for creating grid-based puzzle games, giving developers an incredibly powerful way explore sokoban game design. With both Stephen's Sausage Roll and PuzzleScript, it's safe to say Lavelle has had an incredible influence on modern thinky puzzle games.
To celebrate the game's 10-year anniversary, we asked a handful of developers how Stephen's Sausage Roll has influenced their own puzzle games, design philosophies, and creative visions. You’ll find their words below.
So, on that note, Happy 10th Birthday to Stephen's Sausage Roll!
"Stephen's Sausage Roll is a masterclass of doing a lot with a little - taking a small number of game elements, never adding anything new, but constantly surprising you with the consequences of the mechanics that were always there. Other games have followed this design ethos since (our game A Monster's Expedition among them), but they all stand on the shoulders of this beautiful tower of sausages." – Alan Hazelden (Draknek & Friends, A Monster's Expedition, Spooky Express, Sokobond)
"Player. Fork. Sausage. Grill. Block. Ladder. So much comes from just these 6 objects! Stephen's Sausage Roll masterfully harnesses and explores the deep mathematical richness of sokoban-like systems. And yet, the physical metaphors of these objects keep the ruleset understandable, intuitive, human-relatable, and make the surprising consequences and absurd constructions that much more amazing. SSR exemplifies the qualities of Stephen's huge lineage of sokoban-like games. On a personal note - SSR inspired me to take Patrick's Parabox in a non-action, pure-puzzle direction! And it inspired me to put my name in my game's title!" – Patrick Traynor (Patrick’s Parabox, Linelith)
"When Stephen’s Sausage Roll was first recommended to me I was not a puzzle gamer. I played mostly AAA RPGs. I had a background in AAA art, and I was rather unimpressed with SSR’s aesthetics. At my friend's behest I begrudgingly gave this game and shot, and it changed the course of my career. Stephen’s Sausage Roll was a gateway drug into sokobans in general. I spent hours playing Pipe Push Paradise, then Alan Hazelden’s games, the various sokoban puzzlescript experiments, and so on. I eventually left my indie gig and developed two sokoban titles of my own – Kine and then Lab Rat. None of this would have happened if it wasn't for SSR. I'm so, so grateful that this game exists." – Gwen Frey (Kine, Lab Rat)
"Discovering Stephen's Sausage Roll was so creatively exciting for me. Everything about it had this radical stripped-down purity. 3 inputs, no time pressure, no reflex-based pressure, and yet somehow among the richest experiences I had ever had with a game. It was like 'the Ramones in 1976' of video games. Similar to Fumito Ueda's games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, it pushed back, for me at least, on the expectation of these superficial layers we came to expect in a game. It stretched out my understanding of what a game could be and made me realise those boundaries would continue to stretch, and gosh, how inspiring. I wanted to be a part of it." – Corey Martin (Bonfire Peaks, Pipe Push Paradise)
"Stephen's Sausage Roll taught me to love sokoban. It may have taken me two attempts to get into it, but by the time I'd finally cooked that last sausage, I was a sokoban fan for life. For me, Stephen's Sausage Roll marks a clear shift from classic fiddly sokoban design to the kind of beautiful, deep, insightful, and focused puzzle design we look for in all modern thinky games. Not only that, but both it and the many hundreds of games it has inspired have proven that sokoban, as a puzzle framework, is an unbelievably rich space with still so much to explore." – Joseph Mansfield (Thinky Games)
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