Pipe Push Paradise

An excellent very difficult puzzle game, often compared to Stephen's Sausage Roll. What this game does well is it makes you navigate between high-level and low-level logic. There is the high-level of figuring out where pipes should go, and the low-level of maneuvering them around. There is a satisfaction in realizing just how much deeper the puzzle goes, just how much it offers, and it has a couple of "aha" lynchpins that are quite satisfying. In this sense, it is very much like Stephen's Sausage Roll, and fans of that game would enjoy this. Unfortunately, expectations also need to be tempered, as it falls short compared to Stephen's Sausage Roll in some ways. For starters, it doesn't have meta puzzles. Additionally, Stephen's Sausage Roll masterfully blends the high-level and low-level thinking in that it requires you to interweave between them frequently and constantly. When a low-level move makes you realize the high-level is impossible, you need to revisit the high-level approach. This is not as strong in Pipe Push Paradise, where the high-level approach is usually discovered immediately. Stephen's Sausage Roll also has very tight design in its mechanics, introducing very few new things, while fully exploring all of its possibilities, even the unintuitive edge cases. In Pipe Push Paradise, more mechanics are forcefully injected into the game in order to add interest, and they are not fully explored as much as they very well could be. Your imagination is terrified at how cursed some of these level designs could get, but even the hardest levels never touch that ceiling. Part of the reason could be just how loose the rules get with some edge cases. The game is also much shorter, so that means less mileage. Pipe Push Paradise's harder levels are also not especially tight, often having many solutions, some very simple, whereas Stephen's Sausage Roll has extremely tight solutions when it wants to. Don't get the wrong idea though, all in all, still a wonderful puzzle game with level designs that are a labor of love and use a good dose of creativity, without overstaying its welcome. Just keep expectations tempered when it's compared to Stephen's Sausage Roll, one of the all-time greatest.