My Stephen's Sausage Roll Epiphany

It’s said that after experiencing a great creative work, you’re a different person at the end than when you first began. I just experienced this, in a game where you roll sausages around with a fork.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is one of the most challenging and well designed puzzle games I’ve played. Give it a try before reading on, because I’m about to spoil one of the levels.

I’m a programmer by trade, so it’s no surprise I like puzzle games. And because of the whole programming thing, I probably have above-average grit when it comes to puzzles. I generally don’t look up hints until I’ve spent three or more hours on an individual puzzle, completely stumped.

There’s a puzzle in Stephen’s Sausage Roll called Wretch’s Retreat. I spent six hours on that level. Two were mapping out all possible avenues that might lead to a solution. The other four were checking and re-checking my reasoning, retrying my attempts to figure out what I could possibly be missing. In these four hours, I made virtually no progress.

Eventually I gave in. I turned to the internet to find the tiniest clue to nudge me in the right direction. I found this Steam discussion, which turned out to be the perfect hint.

The author itemized their assumptions about the rules and logic of this level, along with each potential solution and why none were viable. I nodded along as I read this, these were the same assumptions I had come to. Then, in a reply to their own post, the author wrote:

Nevermind, I solved it. Unbelievable. Stuck on it for so long, as soon as I make a post it hits me. If anyone is wondering, the error was assumption (#2).

After reading this, I solved the puzzle in thirty seconds.

The hint hadn’t told me what the solution was, or what I should try next, or what about my assumption was wrong. All it told me was that one of my assumptions was wrong. Which, of course it was, otherwise I would have solved the puzzle already. But simply being told the faulty assumption was enough to make me question it in a way I clearly had not yet, and arrive at a solution immediately.

If I had itemized my assumptions in the same way, and mechanically gone through them one by one actively trying to disprove them, I would have arrived at the solution on my own. If I had told myself “Okay, let’s pretend for five minutes that this thing I’m certain is true is actually false, and try to demonstrate why”, I would have found the hole in my reasoning. I’ve done a lot of problem solving in my life, and don’t think I’ve ever explicitly needed to do this before.

Thanks to Stephen’s Sausage Roll, I’ve added a new tool to my problem-solving tool belt.

As an aside, it’s also fun to see the poster of that discussion discover rubber-duck debugging, a well-known problem-solving technique in the realm of programming.