25 Nov 2020 gaming
Yesterday I finished Stephen’s Sausage Roll, a puzzle game about cooking sausages. It was incredibly challenging, rewarding, clever, and fun. Joseph Anderson, one of my favorite YouTubers, calls it “The Best Puzzle Game I’ve Played”. Jonathan Blow called it “one of the most impressive games ever made.” If you’ve got 30 hours to spare - the puzzles are hard - you should play it.
The controls are beautifully simple: up, down, left, right, rewind, and restart. That’s it. That the game accomplishes so much with so few inputs is extraordinary. The only game that I’ve played that’s come close to the same level of refinement is Snakebird, which coincidentally has the same exact control scheme. This quote from Brian Hamrick’s “Qualities of Well-Written Puzzles” explains what makes both games so good:
Solvers come into solving a puzzle with a lot of rules in their mind. Some of those rules are rules enforced by the puzzle, but there’s also going to be a lot of rules that only exist in the solver’s mind… Snakebird does an amazing job of breaking down rules that exist to the solver but not to the puzzle.
In a word: revelation.
Anyways, as I was playing Stephen’s Sausage Roll, I couldn’t help but think: is this the same as Snakebird, in some way? The mechanics are different, yes, but the controls are the same. Does that mean anything? Could, for instance, every Stephen’s Sausage Roll puzzle be encoded as a Snakebird puzzle, and/or vice versa? If so, would translating from one puzzle space to the other make certain solutions more intuitive? What other representations are possible? Are certain representations more amenable to certain tasks, e.g., puzzle generation?
One day I may take a stab at those questions. Maybe this book will be helpful: Games, Puzzles, and Computation