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
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.
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
I don't know if you're familiar, but it strongly reminds me of some of the earlier chapters of Gödel Escher Bach, exploring formal systems and seeing how intensely complicated they can get even with just 2 or three rules is insane.
"The exercises in your undergrad classes probably required one of two things: having good ideas, or doing hard work. In this class, you have to do both: you need to come up with the idea yourself and do a lot of work to execute it" -- My advisor explaining the difference between undergrad and graduate math This is super true in this game! Many many levels need a huge creative "spark". Where other puzzle games would be "done" at that point, Stephen's Sausage Roll requires you to solve five more "subpuzzles" on your way to implementing your idea.
Most genius puzzle game *ever*, not because it was released last year, but because there are very few games that even come close to this games perfection. I myself call this game one of the extreme few games that capture the true possibilities of video games.
It isn't just Joseph who thinks this game is genius. Influential game developers like Jonathon Blow, among many other game devs, think this game is one of the best ever made.
"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
While Snakebird got much more difficult as it went on (the star levels especially), SSR mostly maintains a similar difficulty throughout. I would maybe put a few puzzles in all of SSR on the same level of difficulty as the easier star puzzles from Snakebird. Most of SSR is about as hard as mid-to-late game non-star-level Snakebird.
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.
I'm probably in the minority, but I actually really like the aesthetics of Stephen's Sausage Roll. The crude texture work, the craggy floors, the calming waters, the pointless day and night cycle, the randomness of the music. I think they give the game a lot of charm. It feels a bit surreal while also being very tranquil.
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.
www.twitch.tv/andersonjph ru-vid.com/show-UCIJlrEQoJE3eI168TWSl39g twitter.com/jph_anderson Here are the links I speak about at the beginning. It should go without saying that you should ignore them if they don't interest you, but if you like streams and let's plays, maybe check them out. The Automata run has some fun moments. Odyssey stream will be at 11 AM EST tomorrow (from when this was posted). I haven't decided if I should do a video on the game yet so maybe people should stop by and convince me to do it, or not do it. Depending on what you want! Thanks!
Recommendation (feel free to disregard, its ur stuff and ur awesome) but your second channel, JASecond Channel is a bit of an, eh name. what if you renamed this channel to Joseph Anderson Reviews and the new one Joseph Anderson Plays??? it just seems a bit more fitting. anyways i love you.
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 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.
No that's definitely valid! I had thoughts somewhat similar to those, but I think overall it wasn't intentionally for that reason. They're serviceable though, and I liked the little story notes more than this video suggests.
I mean you could just look up the game to see the 'twist', but for now, basically consider the idea of *why* there are so many huge sausage shapes lying around in the first place. :P
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.
While I appreciate when a game uses a single mechanic and explore it to its fullest, I have a really hard time thinking how the same principles could be applied to certain genres, particularly Stylish Actions games like Bayonetta where the point of the game is to give a lot of options and freedom to the players
Christian WS In short, it would be way too difficult to pull off and no one would get it even if they did. It's really only with simpler games mechanically can this kind of beauty be pulled off effectively.
I think another point about the limitations is that when your tools are limited you need to put more careful thought and innovation into to how to get the most efficient use out of them. and because you have fewer tools you can afford to put that level of focus into mastering them whereas if you had a bunch of mechanics to work on that extra generalization would lead to many of them being half baked( or grilled in this case). its the same logic behind the word limit for an essay, you need to put a lot of thought into refining your point by removing fluff and unnecessary content.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
joseph got a little frustrated with stephen's longer puzzles that take up more of the screen or introduce tedium in putting sausages in place, or force you to repeat moves over large areas with multiple sausages but with snakebird that's just 70% of the entire videogame, i wouldn't wish snakebird onto joseph, or anyone in this world dont make or let joseph anderson review snakebird
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.
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.
I really enjoy how you break down and show your thoughts on a game. Your Fallout 4 - One Year later video is how I found you. I find when you do lesser known games the more I enjoy the level of understanding you put in. Maybe its since its in a vacuum for me and since I have no bias. Hope you keep doing this deconstruction of games I well keep watching.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
Good stuff on the second channel. You've come to become one of my favourite RU-vidrs and I never miss a video. Thank you for the entertainment and everything else! :)
Just wanted to give you a big thanks for these reviews. I found myself debating over buying a certain circle line game with a big expectation from story, and you really saved me from that. Since then, I've found myself watching your videos about games I have never considered or even heard of buying. And still have no intention of buying, but somehow still watch your videos. O.o I didn't know about your books until your videos, and have checked them out since then ^.^
I think this man might be my favourite creator on RU-vid, period. I love listening to him talk and he seems to have a genuine love for games that get your thinkerbox going.
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!
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 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!
I love this game. got stuck at the great tower, and then my friend sold his gaming computer when he moved. but i look forward to buying it in the future and maybe even complete it.
Oh my god yes your finally streaming, have watched almost all of your videos and darksouls twice, even though i have played barely any of the games on your channel, cant wait to watch on twitch
Another fantastic in depth look at an interesting game. I don't have the patience for this calibre of puzzle game and this is definitely something I wouldn't buy. That said, I really enjoyed your look and dissection of this game. It's interesting how devs can take simple premises and flesh them out into a full game/experience. You said it took about 25+ hours to complete w/out getting bored; that is really amazing for such a simple concept. Granted you are extremely cerebral, meaning it takes a specific brain to extract that level of enjoyment. I'm rambling, and, unlike you my rambling is neither coherent, interesting, or enjoyable. Thanks so much for the continued top notch content! I'm always stoked as fuuuuuuuuck when I see a notification from a vid of yours. :D
I was stuck because, 17:40 I din't think to do that! Thanks for going slow on spoilers! Not sure yet how I'll use it to solve that puzzle XD this game is so good :D
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.
You actually convinced me to give it another try. I love me a puzzle, but ended up among those who got intimidated with the immense difficulty at the start and thought that if it was going to get even worse afterwards then my brain would just boil. Now at least I know that I'm going to get more or less comfortable with the game sooner or later.
Reminds me very much of the puzzle game DROD aka Deadly Rooms of Death. You also occupy 2 spaces, where 1 is the sword that you can rotate around and slay monsters with it.
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!
I think I should wirte a huge thank you after watching this video. Since it gave me the confidence to give this game a second try after I started it a few years ago was impatience, got frustrated and forgot about it. I had the same thing happen to me with the witness since I was so stupid to run into the town first and had no idea what I was supposed to do, but a year later I gave the Witness a second try and now I love it. I was quite suprised by a monsters expdition and with that as a "tutorial game" I am now looking for a new challenge of rolling cylindircal ovbjects.
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.
I call these kinds of game formal or formalist explorations; formulating some simple building blocks specific to an art form, then composing as many variatious structures as possible with those. There’s some mario games that do this, a strict set of level elements composed on this long series of variants. The Witness does this for the parsing of obtuse line drawing visualizations. Etc. There was some painters and musicians and writers exploring their respective art forms similarly, way back when.
And yet most people would rather have art revolve around some kind of storytelling, with a message or at least a theme. I think that artists often end up at the formalist perspective when they're either tired of producing traditional art or just not very good at storytelling. The story is the heart of the work, and without it art feels boring and sterile, like a science experiment with paint, music, etc. instead of chemicals. I agree very strongly that this game is similar to The Witness, and that's precisely what I dislike about it. For both games the emphasis is on engaging with a series of puzzles that brazenly clash with their environment and demand attention. Both games have an excuse of a story that sends no coherent message besides the creator's nihilism and impatience with the whole idea of a story. Neither game has a plot or any ambition to connect with its audience on an emotional level.
The puzzle game Cosmic Express is very similar in the sense that it builds on top of only a handful mechanics to make the hardest puzzle. It looks gorgeous too.
Hi Joseph! long time lurker, when you were talking about squeezing the game's mechanics for everything its got, I remembered a similar analysis done by Extra Credits called Game Depth vs Complexity. I think it hits the nail on what you're referring to.
You should play world of goo if you haven’t already. It’s a fantastic puzzle game and by far my favorite game ever. Also, the music, art style and atmosphere are amazing.
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 that people who love these kinds of games are people who find inherent pleasure in the process of unraveling a complex puzzle. Not that they don't also find joy and satisfaction in finding the solution to it as well. But I think it's something like, there's an inherent fascination with the ways that you can be clever and creative with such a basic set of rules and limitations, and finding joy in the beauty of that. At least, that's what I've observed in my brother, who has always loved these kinds of things and absolutely loved Stephen's Sausage Roll. Totally not my thing, but I'm happy that he enjoys it so much.
I think a term you could use for a concept in a game which is elaborated to a full extent could be motif. It is analogous to the same thing in music composition where an idea is worked on and developed throughout the piece
Joseph, what is your opinion on optional puzzles (regarding the sequence starting from 13:52) seen in puzzle games like SpaceChem and Silicon Zeroes? The optional puzzles in those games are (usually) very hard puzzles that only use the mechanics / items that have been shown to the player by that point.
