Stephen’s Sausage Roll
Increpare – Windows, Mac, Linux
“Functional”, despite being a nominally positive description, is not a word that implies praise. It’s not even really used as a backhanded compliment – grudging acceptance is the feeling that usually comes across. For Stephen’s Sausage Roll, though, “functional” is a superlative.
Sausage Roll is not a pretty game, but it is a beautiful one. It has rudimentary graphics, awkward controls, and a theme that seems so arbitrary and goofy as to feel alienating. But every element that appears unconsidered and tossed-off ends up revealing itself as part of an elaborate whole, with a purity of intent that few games can rival.
The rather lame pun of a name communicates the basic setup: you manoeuvre a weird-looking avatar around a mysterious island, and step into sectioned-off puzzle areas where you must roll, push and otherwise cajole some rather unappetising-looking sausages onto awkwardly placed grills. The trick is that every sausage in the puzzle must be evenly cooked – there are four surface sections that must each touch a grill tile exactly once. Any more than that and it will burn, leaving you with a disgusting, level-failingly burnt sausage. It’s a silly concept that somehow makes intuitive sense.
Even if the general idea clicks quickly, though, the puzzle solutions likely won’t. Very early levels, with their small and uncomplicated layouts, appear straightforward, but can offer unexpected challenges to those hoping for a gentle easing-in to the game’s mechanics. And there are several mysteries even more confounding than the puzzles themselves. Why is the player character carrying around a giant prong? Why are levels dotted around an open area, rather than just automatically presented one after another? And why is this game even in 3D? It looks horrible!
Suffice it to say, each of these choices by the developer were made entirely deliberately. Sausage Roll is a game whose many strange components each have their place when working together. The puzzle complexity ratchets and sometimes rockets upwards, but never from the addition of some new mechanic or level type. Rather, they become trickier as more of the sausages’ fundamental properties reveal themselves in subtly different environments. They may not look tasty, but these are sausages even a vegetarian could love.
Automania
Designed by Kristian A. Østby and Kenneth Minde
Games about cars tend to be, unsurprisingly, pretty fast-paced affairs, shooting for high-octane thrills. That is, when they’re not shooting for *violent*, high-octane thrills. But Automania really isn’t particularly manic at all. It’s a pretty chilled-out game about making sensible decisions regarding the production and distribution of mass-market automobiles. Autosomnia probably doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though.
In any case, even if it is sedate, its easy-to-grasp rules and indirect competition between players keep it breezily entertaining. Each player gets their own little factory board, and, by placing worker figures in certain spots on the main board, they can get upgrade tiles to slot into their production lines. Certain of these upgrade tiles can confer benefits to your produced cars that would be considered especially desirable in one of the game’s two markets – North America and Europe. Say American consumers are really interested in purchasing environmentally friendly vehicles, while safety features are paramount for Europeans. Splitting the difference between these two in your factory probably isn’t the best idea, as each car can only be sold into one market at a time. In this way, the game encourages focused strategy right from the start, where other games might have you muddle directionless for a few turns before everything shakes out.
Market demands can change, though, over the course of the game, meaning that you do have to adapt and sometimes pre-empt your opponents’ moves before they corner a market you were hoping to monopolise. It’s not exactly thrilling, but trading in the perfect racing line for the perfect production line can be just as fun.
Like a Boss: Through the Fire and Flames
Guitar Hero III – various platforms
Some people wildly misconceive of Guitar Hero as a silly, fun activity that goes well with a few friends and a few beers. These people are clearly not familiar with DragonForce’s Through the Fire and Flames. This is the series’ cruel, black heart, and it thumps at around 200bpm – at that rate, any pretensions toward approximating a musical experience fade into abstraction. Not so great for casual socialising, but if you’re eager for early-onset arthritis, you know where to go.
Words: Leo Devlin
