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.
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.
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”.
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]
[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/>
"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".
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.