Narrative Puzzles and Storyless Puzzles — Lorelei vs Stephen's Sausage Roll

Introduction

Sort puzzle games onto two peaks. On one stands the pure contraption with no letters, no dialogue at all. On the other stands the work where solving is the same act as reading a story. April 2016's Stephen's Sausage Roll and May 2024's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes sit cleanly at these two poles. The former means nothing beyond grilling sausages; in the latter, cracking a code is identical to unearthing a mansion's past. Starting from this contrast, I want to think, from a designer's view, about what narrative puzzles and storyless puzzles each sell.

It is easily misread, but the presence of story is not a measure of quality. Both are finished designs; they simply sell different things. As I wrote in the lineage of subtractive design, a verb-narrowed puzzle sells combinatorial explosion itself. A puzzle with story sells the understanding that rises at the moment of solving. Both say 'solved,' but one is the discovery of a maneuver, the other the experience of a world's image coming into focus. I will dig into where this difference comes from, lining up concrete works.

The Abstract Pole — The Strength of Having No Story

Stephen Lavelle's Stephen's Sausage Roll, released in April 2016, has almost nothing you could call a story. You roll sausages and grill all six faces on the grill. That is all. No dialogue, no cutscenes, barely any setting. And yet it is rated one of the peaks of thinking puzzles precisely because cutting the story raised the purity of the maneuvers themselves. The player's attention never wanders; it falls only on the geometry of the board. Having no story is not absence but an active choice to protect that purity.

2015's Snakebird belongs to the same lineage. The colorful snakes are charming, but they carry no narrative meaning. The only core of play is the geometric fact that the body grows and your own length becomes both obstacle and platform. What the abstract pole sells is a purely cognitive pleasure at the instant a solution is found. Because there is no story, the player is freed from asking 'why am I solving this' and can sink into the structure alone. This is not missing information but intended quiet.

The strength of the abstract puzzle is that it can hand you difficulty head-on. With no narrative cushion, the bite of being stuck is laid bare. As I argued in The Ethics of Undo, the judgment of how far to forgive trial rings harder in a work without story. Stephen's Sausage Roll allows undo yet fudges not a single move of the solution. In a world without story, no excuse can slip between the player and the board. This clarity is the value the abstract pole refuses to let go.

When Story Becomes the Solution — Lorelei and the Grammar of Mystery

Simogo's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, released in May 2024, is the opposite design. The player roams an old mansion, gathering fragments: number locks, ciphers, years, the details of paintings. What is decisive is that the answer to each cipher is buried in the mansion's story. A door's code might be a character's birth year or the date of a past incident. Understanding the story and opening the lock become one and the same act. Solution and story are not separated.

This design, where story fuses with mechanism, is not Lorelei's alone. October 2018's Return of the Obra Dinn made the deduction of sixty crew members' fates and identities the very work of restoring the story. October 2022's The Case of the Golden Idol likewise makes filling in each scene's names and causality identical to assembling the truth of its incidents. It overlaps the works in turning looking into play, but goes further, having you write the result of observation down as sentences of the story.

In June 2015's Her Story, the puzzle board itself is a database of interview footage, and the act of searching alone reconstructs the narrative. What these works sell is not the discovery of a maneuver but the moment an image coheres. Scattered fragments, past a single point, connect into one picture. This experience differs in kind from the abstract puzzle's 'solved.' In a narrative puzzle, difficulty is logical and interpretive at once. Raising observational resolution itself moves the story forward.

Story as Decoration, Story as Mechanism — Avoiding a Confusion

Here a design distinction matters decisively: whether story is decoration of the puzzle or its mechanism. 2009's Machinarium has a beautiful story, but that story does not directly take part in the solutions. The robot's wistful journey works as motivation and stage set for solving. In Lorelei or Obra Dinn, the story itself holds the key to the answer. You cannot solve without reading it, and solving advances it. Decoration and mechanism get bundled under the same phrase, 'a puzzle with story,' but as design they are different things.

More confusing still are works that carry no dialogue yet produce a narrative experience. September 2023's COCOON all but eliminates verbal explanation while telling a vast journey through the very nesting structure of its worlds. It belongs fully to neither pole. Keeping an abstinence close to single-verb design, it builds narrative elation from spatial unfolding alone. Do not mistake the presence of story for the presence of words. Story is not language; it is the image of causality that coheres inside the player.

Leave this distinction blurred and say 'I'll make a puzzle with narrative,' and the design goes vague. A decorative story can be added or removed independently of the difficulty of the solution. A mechanism story collapses the solution if you change one character. Machinarium's story is replaceable; Obra Dinn's stops being a puzzle the moment you swap it out. The designer must decide at the very start which layer their own story belongs to.

The Pressure Story Puts on Difficulty — A Design Tradeoff

Building story into mechanism puts a peculiar pressure on puzzle design. In an abstract puzzle the designer can assemble the board chasing difficulty alone. But in a narrative puzzle the solution is bound to the story's consistency. A cipher's answer must be a number plausible within the story. Compared to abstract puzzles that can trigger combinatorial explosion freely, this constraint ties the designer's hands. That Lorelei demands a mountain of handwritten notes shows the labor Simogo paid to make story density and solution density coexist.

The difficulty curve changes too. The vertical wall I discussed in shaping the learning curve stands in abstract puzzles as a pure wall of maneuvers. But in narrative puzzles the cause of being stuck is two-layered: is the logic unclear, or have I missed the story's context? The player must keep separating the two. This can add difficulty, but designed well it allows a rescue impossible for abstract puzzles, dissolving a logical impasse through a narrative discovery.

Which pole to choose depends on what the work wants to sell. To maximize the purity of maneuvers, the story is better cut. To sell the elation of understanding, the story must be woven deep into the mechanism. Add story halfway as mere decoration and you get neither the abstract puzzle's clarity nor the narrative puzzle's immersion. What to avoid most is painting a thin coat of solution-irrelevant story 'for atmosphere.' That actually lowers the player's observational resolution and obscures which details are clues.

Closing

Stephen's Sausage Roll and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, bundled under the same word 'puzzle,' sell entirely different things. The former cut story and raised the purity of maneuvers to its limit. The latter wove story into the solution itself, making understanding the reward. Between them sit Machinarium, which holds story as decoration; COCOON, which tells story without words; and Obra Dinn and Golden Idol, which turn observation into the restoration of story. The presence of story is not rank but a design choice, each carrying its own difficulty and its own pleasure.

If I made a puzzle next, I would first ask myself: does this puzzle want to sell the discovery of a maneuver, or the moment an image coheres? Adding story before that answer is settled is dangerous. If you make story a mechanism, commit and bind the solution; if you swing abstract, cut the words cleanly. The temptation of the middle is the most dangerous. I leave the reader a question: the last time you felt 'solved,' was it the discovery of a maneuver, or the moment a world's image came into focus? That difference is the very line dividing these two poles.