Long Sausage Run

You are a small purple sausage with legs. Somebody at the end of this road is extremely hungry. Go and sort it out. Long Sausage Run is a running game about getting bigger. You set off down a white track as a short, stubby little thing, and you arrive at the other end as something enormous, stretched impossibly long and wide, barely fitting on the road. Getting there means picking the right gates and surviving everything swinging at you in between. GROW AS YOU GO The track is lined with gates in pairs, and you can only pass through one of each. The numbers are right there on them. Plus fifteen. Plus twenty-five. Plus thirty. Some gates stretch you taller. Others, marked with arrows, stretch you wider. A few are red, and those take away what you have worked for. Choosing looks obvious and it rarely is. The gate with the biggest number is often the one tucked behind a hazard, or on the far side of the track with no time to cross. Taking plus ten safely can beat reaching for plus thirty and getting flattened on the way. Lean left, lean right, keep moving. That is the entire control scheme. One thumb, no buttons, no menus. THINGS THAT WANT TO FLATTEN YOU The road is not clear. Spiked iron balls swing across it on long chains, back and forth, in rhythms you can learn. Hammers drop. Blades sweep. The bigger you grow, the more of you there is to hit, which is the lovely trick at the centre of this game. Every gate you take makes you stronger and makes you a larger target at the same time. Get caught and you go down in a floppy, ragdolling heap, limbs everywhere. It never stops being funny. THE PAYOFF Reach the end and you find out what all that stretching was for. Someone is waiting at a table, and what happens next depends entirely on how big you managed to get. Arrive small and it is a disappointment. Arrive at full size and it is a proper event. That final moment is the reason to replay a level you already passed. Finishing is easy. Finishing enormous is the actual challenge. FEATURES - Simple one-thumb steering, nothing to learn - Gates that stretch you taller and wider as you run - Swinging spiked balls, hammers and blades to dodge - A squashy ragdoll character that falls over beautifully - A clean, bright look with no clutter on screen - Levels you can finish in under a minute - An ending that scales with how well you did - Plays offline, anywhere WHY ONE MORE RUN The appeal is the gap between what you got and what was there. You can see the plus thirty gate you missed. Nothing about a failed run feels unfair, which is why you start another one. There is nothing to wait for and no streak to protect. Run, grow, fall over, go again. The loop takes under a minute and it is very easy to lose twenty of them. A MINUTE AT A TIME Each run is short. There is nothing to manage between levels, nothing to check in on, and nothing lost if you put it down mid-run. It is built for the small gaps in a day, the queue, the train, the five minutes before something starts. It is also a good one to hand to someone else. The game explains itself in about three seconds of watching, and the sight of a giant purple sausage cartwheeling into a spiked ball tends to get the phone passed around. GETTING BIGGER, FASTER Width matters more than it looks. A wide run clips gates a narrow one sails past, and it adds up quickly over a long track. Learn the swing, do not race it. The spiked balls move on a fixed rhythm. Wait half a second and the gap opens on its own. Red gates are not always a trap. Taking a small loss to line up two big gains is often the better run. Do not stop growing near the end. The last stretch of track usually holds the largest numbers in the level, and most players are already coasting by then. HOW BIG CAN YOU GET The road is long, the gates are generous, and the spiked balls are entirely indifferent to your ambitions. See how much of you makes it to the table. Download Long Sausage Run and start stretching.