PixelLinkr #1: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Puzzle #1 spent most of its runtime making a case about Valve, about what winning means, and about the specific guilt of choosing genocide in a game that kept giving you a way out.

Here's what was underneath the sixteen games.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Valve

Games: Half-Life 2 · Portal · Left 4 Dead · Team Fortress 2

Valve made some of the most important games of the 2000s and then, gradually, stopped making games in any traditional sense. Half-Life 2 shipped in 2004. The joke about the sequel has been running long enough that the people making it now weren't old enough to play the original when it launched.

Portal started as a student project called Narbacular Drop, which a group of DigiPen students demoed at a Valve careers day. Valve hired the entire team on the spot and told them to rebuild it. The output was a puzzle game about a gun that creates holes in physics, plus a passive-aggressive AI for whom you exist somewhere between an inconvenience and an experiment. Portal 2 is the better game. Portal was the proof of concept.

Left 4 Dead gave co-op zombie survival a Director, an AI that tracked how your run was going and adjusted pressure accordingly. Pulling away from the group brought specials down on you. Struggling through a crescendo event got a brief exhale before the next wave hit. It's one of the most thoughtful difficulty systems in the genre and I still think about it when games fumble this.

Team Fortress 2 launched as a competitive class shooter and turned into something harder to name. The hat economy. The lore buried in comics nobody read and everyone loves. The community servers Valve technically never shut down. It has outlasted more intentional things.

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🟡 Medium: The Game Awards Game of the Year

Games: Overwatch · God of War · It Takes Two · Baldur's Gate 3

Four different years. Four different answers to "what won?"

Overwatch in 2016 feels strange now. At the time, it was genuinely new: a hero shooter with real personality, a roster built for everyone, animated shorts with production values that had no business existing for a multiplayer game. What came after is a different game and a different story. Looking at the 2016 win is like finding an old photo of yourself being very enthusiastic about something you've mostly stopped thinking about.

God of War 2018 did something franchises rarely do. Kratos went from screaming at Olympus to quietly trying to raise a kid in Norse mythology, and Santa Monica shot the whole thing in one unbroken take, no cuts from the opening scene to the credits, which is either an impressive technical feat or the best possible way to signal that this was a different series now. Both, probably. It paid off in ways that changed what "sequel" can mean.

It Takes Two won in 2021 on the strength of a co-op game about two people getting divorced who are turned into dolls by a self-help book. That sentence is accurate. The game keeps inventing new things for you to do and new reasons to care about the couple doing them, and it somehow earns the ending it goes for.

Baldur's Gate 3 was made by Larian Studios, a Belgian developer who was still actively supporting Divinity: Original Sin 2 during production. It beat every game with three times the budget at TGA. Swen Vincke's acceptance speech was more genuine than most Oscar speeches, which isn't something I expected to type.

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🔵 Hard: You Were the Villain All Along

Games: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic · Spec Ops: The Line · Undertale · Braid

Spoilers. Obviously.

KOTOR drops its hand about thirty hours in: you are Darth Revan. The Sith Lord who started the war. The Jedi Council knew. Your mentor knew. You were the villain they were trying to stop, you successfully stopped yourself, and the game presents you with this information and asks what you'd like to do with it. Most players had named Revan something embarrassing and had to sit with that for the credits.

Spec Ops: The Line runs about six hours. It begins as a military shooter and ends as something that makes you reconsider your relationship with the genre. The white phosphorus sequence is the point of no return. By the time Walker reaches the final confrontations in Dubai, the monster he was dispatched to deal with has been him for a while. The game knows you played it all the way to the end.

Undertale's genocide route exists because you chose it. The game offers a fully playable, fully realized path where you hurt no one, and if you take the other path anyway (grinding every encounter, hunting every enemy down) Chara doesn't force you. Chara watches. The game can't make you stop. All it can do is record the choices you made and make sure you can't pretend otherwise.

Braid in 2008 looked like a charming indie platformer about a man trying to find a lost princess. The final level runs in reverse, and in reverse, Tim isn't rescuing her. He's pursuing her. She's been running from him. Jonathan Blow has elaborated on this and walked some of it back in interviews. I still think the simple reading is right, and it hits harder for not being spelled out.

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🟣 Tricky: Title Begins with DARK

Games: Darkstalkers · Darkwatch · Darkest Dungeon · Darksiders

Four games, four different decades, four entirely different genres. All open with D-A-R-K.

Darkstalkers is a Capcom fighting game from 1994 about monsters (Dracula, a merman, a succubus, a werewolf) hitting each other with great style. Darkwatch is a 2005 FPS about a train-robbing outlaw who accidentally releases an ancient vampire while cracking open a cargo coffin, gets bitten, and then has to decide whose side he's on. Darkest Dungeon is the gothic roguelite that kills your named heroes, has you rename their replacements, lets you get attached to the replacements, and then kills those too, soundtracked by Wayne June reading stress-inducing Victorian narration directly into your ear. Darksiders is what you get if you asked God of War to get very invested in DC Comics' version of the Book of Revelation.

Nothing connects them thematically. Different publishers, different platforms, different target audiences, different decades. The only shared thread is four letters.

This is the category that feels cheap until you land it, and then feels like it was sitting right there the whole time. That's more or less the whole game.

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If the villain reveal group is still with you, good. Spec Ops in particular does something most games avoid: it makes the bad decision fully available, requires you to make it actively, and then doesn't look away from what you did.

If you want the movie version of that same category (films where the ending changes everything) today's CineLinkr puzzle has a twist endings group that'll give you the same feeling.