This weird little game took me years to finish. I probably could have beaten it faster, but looking back on it now, I’m glad I took my time. It’s the perfect game to slowly chip away at it a few puzzles at a time.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is the kind of game that you can really only play once, at least for the full proper experience of it. The actual process of learning how to play is so rewarding and such an intrinsic part of the game. In the beginning, even the simplest things take so much effort and brain power. But this game rewired my brain. It’s kinda like how people start seeing interlocked shapes everywhere after playing Tetris for a while. I started moving differently in my dreams. This game made me feel like a genius in a way that no other game has. It gets to a point where you start planning ten, twenty steps ahead like some kind of chess grandmaster.

Maybe the biggest fault of Stephen’s Sausage Roll is that the difficulty tapers off in the final few hours. On top of that, the final puzzle is unusually straightforward and repetitive when compared to most other puzzles in the game. But I suppose it’s inevitable after spending so much time getting familiar with the movement and mechanics. It just made for a slightly disappointing finale to an otherwise fantastic game.

I had a great time with Stephen’s Sausage Roll and would easily recommend it for anyone who enjoys a nice brain workout.

It's hard to believe Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was made for the same hardware that its predecessor released on just three years prior. As many have pointed out before, this plays almost like a 2D version of Metal Gear Solid. It has the cinematic presentation, the wacky characters and winding story, and the stealth-action gameplay that Metal Gear Solid would go on to further refine in 1998. The game has a lot of style and confidence, and tells a fairly fleshed-out story for its time. Hideo Kojima and his team proved themselves capable of growth and perhaps even greatness.

The game's ambition comes not without growing pains. And the game is unfortunately held back in some ways by the aging hardware of its time. Navigation feels awkwardly segmented with the game's grid-based maps and frequent loading transitions. Most optional codec conversations are either unhelpful, uninteresting, or unfunny, and often lack any relevance to Snake's immediate situation. The game unfortunately also falls back on the same cryptic gameplay that plagued the first game.

With that being said, Metal Gear 2 has a lot to like for fans of the later games. And when you manage to get through a room undiscovered or find the obscure solution to an environmental puzzle, the game can be quite satisfying. I think I'll just stick to the 3D games, but this was fairly enjoyable and great to play as a fan of the series.

It's pretty interesting how much the series owes to this first entry as primitive as it sometimes seems. So many recurring concepts and gameplay elements got their start here, which is why it's so unfortunate that this game is such a slog. Often overly cryptic and poorly paced, Metal Gear is just not very fun.

With a barely-there plot and so many non-characters given a single line of dialogue, you would never guess that a complex narrative spanning several decades would be built around this little game.

As a big fan of the Solid games, I'm glad to have played this for historical context, but I can safely say I will never be revisiting this.