Playing Stephen's Sausage Roll will make you tense. Also, hungry.
This wonderful new puzzle game for Windows and Mac by prolific independent developer Stephen Lavelle is, as the name suggests, about rolling sausages. You play as a small person with a big fork, trapped on an island full of sausages. And grilles. You must cook the sausages to perfection, one grid puzzle at a time.
The game, rendered in a basic polygonal style that feels borrowed from a Windows 95 screensaver, wraps its devious challenges in a healthy dose of absurdism. Nothing about it invites—or rewards—deep inquiry.
Why am I on this island? To cook sausages.
Why am I cooking sausages? Because.
Will I ever eat the sausages? Stop asking silly questions.
But make no mistake: The challenges are devious. Hard puzzle games often vex me, and Stephen's Sausage Roll is no different. Using an artfully awkward control scheme, you must guide your avatar around tiny grids, nudging sausages with your fork to place them on grill plates. Cook each sausage well, meaning placing each of four, er, meat quadrants on a grill plate exactly once, and you've solved the puzzle. You can fail in two ways: burning the sausage, or knocking it into the water.
