Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Imo it's better to approach Demon's Souls as an exploration puzzle game with RPG stuff and combat, not as an action RPG (such as Dark Souls 3).

That said, The Witness isn't a bad game as such, though the puzzles do get a bit repetitive in my opinion. I prefer more variety rather than hyper focus on one type of puzzles.