> very challenging > big interconnected world > a lot of rolling So it's basically Dark Souls of puzzles.

I can't finish the video because I don't want to be spoiled but now I'm probably gonna blow too much money on a sausage rolling game and it's all your fault

"From this point onward you will be manipulating more than just sausages." -Joseph Anderson 2017

up until 17:45 or so, I was already convinced that the game was clever. But then he suddenly used a sausage to pull an entire chunk of the level out of the water, & I knew it was brilliant.

I have a midterm in 5 hours and I’m watching a critical review of a sausage puzzle game.

the way the developer explored and refined the simple concept of rolling sausages onto grills to such an extreme is almost like how a mathematician explores/develops a new field of mathematics there's so much depth that can arise from a simple set of rules if you choose to explore it fully

"Don't add content until you cant add any more. Build upon what you have until you can't change anything without the whole game breaking" I'm not sure the exact quote or the person who said it, but It's something along the lines of this, and I think it describes this game well

It's basically the dark souls of family cook outs.

now youre thinking with sausages

Man, I'm usually one who enjoys puzzle games, but this one looks like it would drive me insane. Similar to the last few levels in Snakebird.

How did you just convince me that a game about rolling meat is the most genius game of the year?

The amount of times you have to say the word "sausages" in this video is outrageous and I like it.

I really like how jagged and roughly textured everything looks in this game. I don't know why, but I find it very visually appealing.

I enjoy light puzzling in games, but Stephen's Sausage Roll is definitely beyond me. I love videos like this because it helps me not miss out on really cool experiences that I would frankly not enjoy playing through but still appreciate hearing and learning about.

This is one of the most tame, reasonable YT comment sections. Your videos are worth it if only for their ability to discourage shitposting and encourage actual thought. Not even joking, that’s a rare gift.

21:49 i learned in grade school that restrictions breed creativity. like if someone put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and said “write an essay” i wouldn’t know where to start. but if they gave me a clear set of instructions for the essay then i could write something really good.

I've just started playing this game. I've played this game 21 hours this week alone. I'm on level 3. I literally played and stared at one level with the controller down for 3 hours earlier today.

I think the reason stephen's sausage roll and other puzzle games get to reach this level of depth with only a few mechanics is because the entire runtime can be dedicated to that mechanic rather than the runtime being split between developing 5 different mechanics, and also less mechanics reduces the number of tutorials needed for just learning how the game works.

I know you didn't find the story too impressive, but I really liked how the crude style of art and the late story reveals served to make a puzzle game about rolling sausages around genuinely sinister in a way. The basic art no longer is simply a result of a limited budget, but actively serves to make you doubt the reality of the actions you do in the game. Or maybe I am overthinking it, but the presentation unsettled me well enough during the final third anyway.

check out stephen lavelle's other games, he's kind of a creative genius imo

14:07 "...there are a lot of girls..." :o?

Hey Joseph, You wanted to think about how games can fully explore their mechanics, and why simpler games seem to be able to do it better. I have a couple ideas for you. 1.) Games are about their limitations. What you can't do is frequently just as important as what you can do. Multiple mechanics frequently get in the way of how in depth other mechanics can be explored. Think if Stephen's Sausage Role gave you a jump button to leap over a single square and how many puzzles would now be broken. A simpler idea, imagine if Super Mario World never went underground and you could fly through every stage. Limitations are the challenge, and there's elegance in simplicity that allows you to fully explore an idea, in part by preventing you from taking an easier route with more complexity (more options). 2.) Consider how rare it is that even a simple game like Stephen's Sausage Roll is fully explored. Developers are only people too, even the best would struggle to fully explore more complicated games. Perhaps it is also a limitation of us all just being human. Maybe it could be done, but its improbable for our puny human minds. Think about how difficult it is to balance something like an RTS. It is hard to prevent dominant strategies from emerging because there is too much complexity to account for it all. Thanks for this btw, I was super happy to see this game get some publicity, it needs it. Your videos genuinely keep getting better and better and I appreciate that you are willing to grow so much.

It took me a while after beating the game to realize that I really haven't played anything better than it, ever.

Can't wait for your view on Baba is you

This is absolutely not the kind of game I would enjoy, as I usually just end up brute forcing my way through puzzles even in games where they aren't the main focus. But I always enjoy listening to you deconstructing what you think about a given game in fully fleshed out details, using comparisons, metaphors, and examples to make a clear picture of your points and arguments.

Expect the unexpected. Stephen's Sausage Rolls instead of Witcher or Nier! Love ya.

21:27 This was a long time ago, and it might not be the exact term you're looking for, but I do have one: *Emergent complexity,* specifically where it can refer to games. It refers to complex situations that can arise from relatively simple mechanics at play.

I found the last puzzle fun personally. It has so many solutions it could be considered more of a problem than a puzzle, with some tedious ways of tackling it and some more satisfying/interesting. I may have gotten lucky with mine, and you may have found an awful and long way. I still think it’s great because it’s a great climax to the game, “”story”” wise and gameplay wise. I also like the great tower since it really lets you know what your in for.

Who is Stephen and why is he rolling sausages?

“You’re like one of the sausages.” I don’t know if that was intentional Joseph, but if it was it was really smart.

I am not really a fan of complicated puzzle games, but I love your analysis of them. This video was great (and it reminded me of your awesome Witness video). ...now get some sleep! P.S. Greetings from Europe, where this video came out at a very reasonable hour ;-)

Joe, I've never been a recognised content creator but I can imagine the difficulties one could have in relating to how your viewers see you. I'd like to remind you of your own idols, the content creators that have influenced, inspired, comforted, intrigued and entertained you. You now take up that role, not just for myself but for many others too. If you've ever followed a streamer avidly or read an engaging biography. If you've ever studied someones work because you see the quality, expression and genuine value in their process. If you've ever created that emotional attachment that comes from recognising traits and behaviours that you could learn from to become better. Then you understand the nature of what you mean to us. Thank you.

Glad to see you playing another puzzle heavy game, I feel these are where your observations really shine!

I love this video and I just got the game because of it! Loving it so far, and the spoilers didn’t do too much harm. There’s a lot of learning how to think that can only happen by experiencing the game first hand. The ‘rules’ of the puzzles settled in only after having a tactile connection with the game. This process of learning has been very satisfying and continuously engaging. Thanks, Joseph!

wow... was wondering YESTERDAY if you had ever got your hands on this one. my favorite game. thank you for this.

Dammit Joe, I was trying to sleep

The absurdity of you saying "sausage" over and over, very seriously, is simply delightful. 10/10 sausages. Would recommend.

It's kind of like the dark souls of platformers

In my play of the game I got to the great tower, and after quite some time I was able to solve it, but it didn't leave me satisfied. I no longer felt excited about learning new things because that one I felt introduced too many concepts all at once, and was afraid the rest of the game was going to be like that so I stopped the game with two “worlds” completed. I knew I probably could have kept going, but I had many other games to play and no longer felt my investment to each puzzle solution was worth the payoff of slowly harder puzzles that took longer. I think if I had more time I would have gone through to the end, and your video is great at showing the good feelings I had at the start do apply to the rest of the game. Your analysis encourages me to try again sometime, and I enjoyed hearing about it, thanks again.

Do you think that SnakeBird deserves a similar video? The controls are exactly the same as SSR, and puzzles are complex while looking simple as well. The final series of puzzles is done in a perfect way IMO. After being amazed by the game's adorableness and puzzle design, I'd love to see a comprevensive review of SnakeBird.

“Now you’re thinking with sausages”

I can't beleive I just watched a 25 minute video about fucking sausage and enjoyed it.

This game is way beyond my brainpower but I did enjoy watching you do it!

The artstyle reminds me of Petscop, I love it

Take a shot every time Jo says "sausages"

This game is also on sale until the first of November, (currently about 12 USD) so if the price was throwing some people off, they can get it now :)

Here is my theory about why the later levels feel 'easier' than the earlier ones. First of all, when you get the newer areas, you have gained a lot of knowledge from solving the puzzles in the previous ones. As a result, you are able to think more abstractly about this game. This means that you won't try to do the most obvious thing when you encounter a new puzzle (although you might still try it, just to see why it doesn't work). Secondly, the first few puzzles give you a very small area, and they expect you to use almost all of the tiles. However, if you look at the later stages, they have huge, open, areas. This is because it would be extremely frustrating to pay attention to every single move that you make. Also, notice how some of the later puzzles are just simply 'push sausage onto grill and cook' (this is especially notable in worlds 3 and 4). The only thing is that you need to figure out how to get the sausages to the grill. To add to this, there are next to no repeated concepts. Many things that you learn in the previous areas are rarely needed in the later ones. For instance, stepping on a grill to get some extra reach is rarely used anywhere else in the game.

Incredible game. I'd be hesitant to recommend it to anyone though due to the sheer difficulty. Some of the puzzles are both ridiculously punishing but also incredibly rewarding. When I realized what you had to do to solve "Backbone", I literally went holy shit. That puzzle took me the longest by a wide margin. I agree with your criticism of the god pillar - it would be exactly the same puzzle if it were only 4 towers, and making it 8 only made it punishing to experiment ,which goes against the spirit of the game. However, I think you did it the hard way. It's much easier to build the tower on the center of the level and then move it into place at the end.

17:50 OH MY GOD WHAT

Thanks for the recommendation! I really enjoyed this game. It’s definitely one of my top 3 favourites, though the number one spot still goes to Baba is You.

Yes! Thank you! This is seriously one of my favourite games of all time, and I am so happy that you are covering it. Every level has a perceptual shift. All of them features a "Eureka!" moment, and it's great. I love that someone is giving this the attention it deserves.

17:48 "From this point onwards, you will be manipulating more than just sausages" my internal monologue when I got my first gf

I love Stephen’s sausage. Everyone should give Stephen’s sausage a try. I promise you’ll like Stephens sausage.

joseph talking about a overall well-made game: there's so many problems! joseph talking about stephen's sausage rolls: this is some serious gourmet shit!

I think this man might be my favourite creator on KZfaq, period. I love listening to him talk and he seems to have a genuine love for games that get your thinkerbox going.

Thank you so much! This is the first comprehensive video review I've seen of SSR, and you've noticed and noted all the features I think make it an excellent puzzle. Thanks for giving this some good publicity. I might reply to this later with some notes.

THE SAUSAGES ARE PEOPLE !!!!!! THE SAUSAGES ARE PEOPLE !!!!!!!

Get it while it's on sale boys.

This is making me extremely hungry

that sausage tower made drop this game but ill return

watching this after beating the whole game is so liberating, i couldnt recommend it more

This really reminded me of Baba Is You. The really challenging levels and with the pure focus on puzzles.

I love this game, checked it out thanks to your well-thought out review. Tysm

21:56 Too many options definitely inhibit creativity, as odd as it might sound. It's a term called Creative Constraints

It's funny, I bought this game on Jonathan Blow's recommendation and got about 80% through, but despite some entertaining mechanic discoveries I didn't really enjoy it. I wonder how much these kind of minimalist puzzle games hinge on the pleasure of "feeling smart" after solving them? Maybe I just don't respond strongly enough to that pleasure cue. I know I'm reasonably smart, and I know I can make progress with patience and persistence, but part of me is always asking "why am I spending all this time and hard work meticulously analyzing these mechanics"? The game offers few rewards in the way of aesthetic pleasure - visuals, music, story, or anything else - so it lives or dies on either the ego rush of feeling smart, or the pleasure rush when a solution "clicks" in your mind. It's like the joy of discovering the mathematical properties of some arcane system, but with pure mathematics at least you have a good chance of applying your results to other things. Anyway I applaud the designer's effort and skill in exploring and presenting this simple set of game mechanics so deeply, but I'm not sure I actually enjoy the results of this type of thing.

I feel like snakebird is similar, but the sheer amount of depth in the mechanics displayed before even the halfway mark of this video... holy shit

I may not love puzzles due to a shite attention span but I DO love watching your videos and listening to your opinions on games, never stop.

Now I really want a Joe Anderson Podcast where Joe talks game philosophy like at the end of this video

The walking onto a grill thing i totally missed and got me permanently stuck on the first part of the game. GOD this game is hard.

Daily streams? Awesome!

That moment you realize he isn't joking and that this isn't an April Fools video

My dad's always complaining that he can't find puzzle games like those on his old Amiga and Apple. Just got him this game! It reminds me of Peg It and Push-Over which he loved.

this game has the best puzzle and lore

I love listening to people talk about things they're passionate about and this was amazing to hear.

Its way too late at night and I have just been marathoning your videos. I don't agree with you all the time but always love your opinions. But I'm so glad to see you mirroring every single thought I've had for Stephens Sausage Roll. It's one of my favorite puzzle games.

I like the idea of a complex puzzle game that tries to put players off on purpose so that there are less solutions and let’s plays available online, forcing people to solve the puzzles themselves.

Wow, did not expect this kind of thinking from a game that looks like this. Congratz you have just obtained: +1 Mindblown Person.

On the concept Joseph calls "refinement" in this video; when a game fully explores all of its concepts while forcing the player to do the same through challenge: I don't think that's quite as uncommon as this video might imply. I don't have a different word I use for this idea, it's just how I think of really good games. Quality multiplayer games are often like this. In a fighting game one character will usually have several dozen moves or more, each with different properties. To consistently win with that character you have to teach yourself everything about those moves, as well as how they interact with each other, and how they affect different opponents in different ways. That's what it takes to master just ONE character when fighting games usually have upwards of 20 and sometimes much more. The more you learn the more clear it becomes how different concepts intertwine. Moves that appear useless at first can become valuable tools as your understanding of the game deepens. It's a very rich, rewarding gameplay experience that can be enjoyed for any length of time you care to invest. You can play a quality fighting game for ten years and still learn new things about it every time you play. To me, that's what it means for a game to be great. Other genres can also follow this pattern. Versus puzzlers like Puyo Puyo and Panel de Pon build from the simple concept of moving colored shapes to towering, intricate concepts that can take years to master. Single player games can be like this as well if they are challenging enough to fully explore solid concepts. Danmaku games initially seem like a pure test of skill and hand-eye coordination, but the more I play them the more they feel like puzzle games, a cerebral test to see if I can find the loose thread in the sweater made out of bullets. I think any type of game can achieve this degree of exquisite, intricate gameplay. Even genres like RPGs with menu-based combat, which many people seem to disdain or even hold in contempt (the term "jarpig" is thrown around a lot where I tend to discuss video games) can attain this level of gameplay if they have interesting core concepts they push to the limit with difficulty.

Orson Welles once said "the enemy of art is the absence of limitations" I think that's what you're experiencing here. This is why games that have more to do often feel less refined and less substantial. Stephen made a very clear and deliberate decision here: his game is about moving sausages. Everything you can do to them to move them is a method of moving them and is available to you from the outset. Nothing is unlocked, instead its merely not required. By limiting himself to this one simple mechanic of gameplay, he created a honed puzzle game where the player can really lose themselves if they let themselves.

Stephen + Johnathon Blow = Game of the Decade.

Oh yeah, this game is on sale at Steam for about a tenner. It's time to pick it up if you're gonna.

Ha, ha, ha! xD Spoil away Mr Anderson 'cause there is no way in hell I'm ever gonna roll Stephen's sausage. xD

I can definitely agree with you that "The Great Tower" level felt daunting, because it was what personally made me stop playing the game (which I may now return to, thanks to your video), because it simply felt like it was so much to process compared to the other levels I'd done, there was tons of different height levels, so many sausages to cook, and it was a lot to process, and after trying for a while I just sort of got burnt out because of it, and like you said, in the hour or so I spent trying to solve it, I had no real clue of whether I was even close to the real solution or not.

Ur genuinly one of the most interesting people ive ever seen on youtube and the long wait per video is a killer so hopefully these streams help with that lol

"Restrition breeds creativity." Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering.

Normally I would never click on anything titled "Stephen's Sausage Roll", but after watching this, you've convinced me to get the game.

>Early learning curve >Throwing player in the thick of it >Players think it's a brickwall This describe's Wizardry VII's intro perfectly. Wizardry has historically been one of the harder RPGs in it's era. After creating your characters, you are dropped outside of the city areas. Naturally, bandits loot just by taking 5 steps. How do you survive? By finding a secret entrance to a dungeon, leveling up there and then fighting the bandits to reach the city, of course. I highly recommend watching GeorgGreat's video on Wizardry VII. It's a reflection on how RPGs used to be back then.

I haven't played the game and am not really interested in trying, but I'm very impressed by the way you synched the video and the audio on this one. It's always clear what exactly you're talking about. Nice one. Also, the word you''re looking for with games of that kind is "emergent".

I played this game on your recommendation, finished it a few hours ago, and finally watched this video. First of all, I'd like to thank you for that recommendation. This is a game that I'd never heard of before, and likely never would have noticed without your insistence on its quality as a puzzle game. With that said, I think the point the game soured for me was Backbone, the puzzle you mentioned with the big pit. It was the only puzzle where I was forced to admit that I just wasn't smart enough (or possibly patient enough) to finish this puzzle, and I just wanted it to be over so I could keep playing this otherwise enjoyable game. But afterwards a lot of the puzzles felt like anticlimaxes compared to that difficulty, similar to what you described happening after you completed Folklore. I really wish the later levels had kept a bit more of the earlier levels' ability to, if you got stuck, go try and solve another puzzle and let this one sit in your subconscious. I think that flexibility and ability to set your own difficulty curve is the key component of all my favorite puzzle games, and it being present in the first half of the game made the absence in the second half all the more noticeable.

Ive checked 5 times to see if this was an April fools joke! Now I realize... I WAS THE JOKE

drinking game: take a gun shot every time he says sausage

Wow! I learned about this game from Jonathan Blow, who also said it was the greatest puzzle game he had ever played (I found it weird that the creator of such a large-scale game like The Witness would be in awe of some polygonal sausage game, so it must have been good.) Never expected someone else I knew of to actually know what it was though. This game needs some more recognition!

WHAT ARE THE SAUSAGES? you said they weren't really sausages so what were they?

The amount of times he says "stevens sausage roll" with a straight face is an achievement in itself!

I’d hate every minute of this game but I can respect the HELL out of this

I seriously expected this video to be a joke, but its actually pretty interesting. You definitely moving in the right direction with youre recent videos Joseph!

The Great Tower is where I put the game down in 2016. Funnily enough - the solution is pretty simple. However, to find it, you have to sift through a lot of new behavior and take it upon yourself to experiment a bit. A sausage being stuck on your head or temporarily stuck on your fork or rolling when stacked or not rolling when moved in parallel could have been broken down into like 4 different levels. You need to know how all of that works to formulate the solution for this level in your head, but it's the first time you are seeing all of it at once so your hands are tied at the start. I think for most people the experience going into that level is, "Geez this game is awkward. Wait what is this? The Grea- how the fuck? Ok guess I'll just start moving stuff...wait the sausage is on me? Let's just get everthing over to the wall...Wait did it spin on my head? A fuck it fell off my head this isn't gonna work. Now that one is on my fork!? Ok lets just make sure to turn away from the stack so I dont spin this one too...ah...wha...it just fell off...why...what is even happening right now?"

In response to 21:49 Creativity doesn't necessarily have to come from freedom, but also from restriction. Some of the most impressive coding technique, graphic algorithm and sound engineering came from demoscene, which is pretty much defined by strict hardware restriction. Business doesn't bother with developing these incredible ideas anymore because they now have the freedom of just throwing in more expensive, cutting edge hardware at the problem, which is both faster and cheaper than developing a solution. In this manner, freedom (granted by technology and capitals) has effectively killed off ingenuity.

@21:20 Hey Joseph I believe the term you're looking for is "emergent gameplay"

I've had this game backed up in my Steam library for a while and had no intention of playing it strictly due to the bad title and graphics, but I guess I'll have to actually play through this now, thanks for letting me know!