”Thinky puzzle games” is a specific subgenre and community, revolving mostly around variations of sokoban, but really has an appetite for any game that deeply explores how a few mechanics can be combined and lead to interesting consequences.

Overall, I probably agree that Baba is You is a better game, but I think what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll receive so much praise is that the puzzle design is incredibly tight. It's a very straightforward concept and the core mechanic does not change between the first and the last level. But the puzzles are expertly crafted in a way that as you progress through the game you naturally come across situations where you think you know everything about the game and then it surprises you with a new mechanic that you did not expect.

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.

SSR walked so Baba could run

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.

> After reading the linked article, and the comments here I still have zero clue about the game

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.

The game is about rolling sausages over grills to cook them on both sides. However, that's completely unrelated to why it's so acclaimed.

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.

The problem is, the ways that it's great are hard to put into words and explain for someone unfamiliar with the game. At least, not in a succinct way. At the most basic level it's just block pushing puzzles ("Sokoban").

Almost anybody who grew up with video games in the 80s played Sokoban and knows exactly what that refers to. It was THE puzzle game in the early days of video games... that and maybe millipede.

> It would surely sell more if people would actually explain what the game is

And even more if figuring out how to buy it wasn't a challenging puzzle in its own right.

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