

Team Fortress 2 - an all-new version of the legendary title that spawned team based multiplayer action games. Portal - a pioneering type of single player action game that rewrites the rules for how players approach and manipulate their environment – much like how Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun reinvented the way gamers interact with objects in the game. Half-Life 2: Episode Two - the second installment in Valve's episodic trilogy advances the award-winning story, leading the player to new locations outside of City 17. Freeman reconnects with Alyx Vance and her robot, Dog, as they continue their support of the resistance's battle against the Combine forces. Freeman, who must immediately face the repercussions of his actions in City 17 and the Citadel. Half-Life 2: Episode One - The player reprises his role of Dr. And a lot of people - people he cares about - are counting on him. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. Simple puzzles become invisible techniques, longer puzzles become mental challenges that have to be broken apart before being solved, and then those simple puzzles go from an impossibility to an ‘of course!’ Not that it stops the headaches.Games included in The Orange Box compilation: The original Half-Life 2 - The player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling.


Evil genius, obviously, but that still counts.Īnd that’s obviously just the first levels. Then there’s the discovery that you can stick your fork into a sausage, but only if something’s behind it. Being able to apply that force from different directions becomes crucial to moving them around. Being able to balance half a sausage over the edge of a map is something you have to learn. Likewise, the presence of the fork sticking out and its effect on the sausage means that something as simple as turning right immediately becomes not just a change of direction, but a puzzle solving component. As a really basic example, how often do you move backwards in a puzzle game rather than turning around? Just to start many of the levels, you have to manoeuvre in front of the little ghostly icons that mark each puzzle onto the map and then back into it. Stephen’s Sausage Roll expects you to pick them up on your own, working in both a logical method and an unusual one.
STEPHENS SAUSAGE ROLL GAME BOX ART TWITCH SERIES
Even The Witness starts by having you master the art of straight lines, with a series of screens showing the grammar of its world. Generally they start by teaching you the rules. It’s hard because it works in a different way to most puzzle games. That sound you can hear is the ghost of Gordon Ramsay screaming about this production line. These are some rancid looking sausages, even before they start being shoved over grass and mud and dangled over the ocean. It doesn’t even go for a sizzling temptation in the stomach.

And then waddling along in its wake, Stephen’s Sausage Roll? A game ever bit as clever and fiendish as any, but content to hide it behind pixels and the silliest name since Tongue of the Fatman. The Witness had years of public development and talk about the language of its puzzles, the subtle meanings to be unlocked, the philosophies and grand designs typically granted to something like a BioShock or some other big-budget game. And yet at the same time, pretty much never has a puzzle game managed to squeeze so much out of such a simple concept. Rarely has a puzzle game’s first level planted its flag so deep into the ground, or been so prepared to rub salt into the wound. Probably the closest he ever got was Ernő’s Sausage Roll, as written on a brown paper bag to stop some bugger stealing his lunch.īut no. Professor Rubik never considered this along with his cubes, his clocks and his snake. A simple little puzzle game, with a legacy ranging from Sokeban to The Witness.
