Stephen's Sausage Roll

The Clover lures players into rolling sausages onto the nearest grills. In The Clover, a level by Stephen Lavelle, the obvious move is to roll all three sausages onto the nearest grills. Doing so leaves no way to reach the exit, so the player walks into the puzzle's central catch.

The false assumption gives players a starting point and nearly guarantees a first failure that feels like a joke at their expense. They learn how the puzzle is built while failing. Mark Brown's description: "The developer, Stephen Lavelle, has used an assumption to walk the player right into the puzzle's central catch."

Stephen's Sausage Roll lets players skip stuck levels and return later. Like Braid and Baba Is You, it lets players skip levels, play out of order and come back. Portal and Inside, by contrast, are linear.

Mark Brown prefers this structure because one hard puzzle should not become a wall. He built a hub with doors between puzzles in Mind Over Magnet for that reason. He said: "I'm not keen on giving the player a big brick wall just because they got stumped on one of the puzzles."

People who finish it are expert puzzle players, a narrow audience. Mark Brown worried that experts who had finished Stephen's Sausage Roll and Baba Is You would find his gentler game simple. He concluded they were not his audience.

He targets fans of gentle puzzle adventures such as Toki Tori, Boxboy, Inside, Limbo and Portal. His point was that a clear target audience tells you whose playtest feedback to weigh.