PixelLinkr #3: The Story Behind the Puzzle

The Nintendo Switch launched with Breath of the Wild, which is one of the best games ever made, and 1-2-Switch, where the main attraction is miming a cow milking competition using Joy-Cons. This is the range we were working with in 2017.

---

🟢 Easy: Nintendo Switch Launch Titles

Games: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild · 1-2-Switch · Super Bomberman R · Snipperclips

Breath of the Wild is the system seller and the conversation-ender. It launched on both the Switch and the Wii U on the same day and sold the Switch anyway because it felt like a game that was for the console in a way that Wii U games never quite managed. The open world, the physics system, the climbing mechanic, it rewrote what a Zelda game was allowed to be, and most of the industry has been trying to catch up since.

Then the other three.

1-2-Switch is a party game built to demonstrate the Joy-Con hardware in the most direct, slightly embarrassing way possible. You hold the controllers and follow on-screen animations. You milk cows. You have a quick-draw duel. You count the balls inside a virtual safe by feel. It retailed for full price, which remains one of the great Nintendo confidence moves.

Snipperclips is genuinely good and deserves better than being the fourth name in this list. Two players control paper cut-out characters and snip pieces off each other to solve puzzles. It's cooperative, it's inventive, and it's the game parents actually wanted at the Switch launch.

Super Bomberman R was $50 and the campaign was short. Konami charged $50. The online multiplayer was its own conversation. Everyone moved on.

---

🟡 Medium: Originally Released for Dreamcast

Games: Jet Set Radio · Sonic Adventure · Shenmue · Space Channel 5

The Dreamcast (1998–2001) had a built-in modem, memory cards with their own LCD screens, and a library of games that were genuinely ahead of their time. It also lost the console war so completely that Sega left the hardware business entirely. The failure doesn't make the games worse. The games were great.

Jet Set Radio is a game about spray-painting Tokyo while rollerskating to a J-pop and hip-hop soundtrack and evading an authoritarian police chief who is, somehow, escalating. The visual style (cel-shaded, bright, aggressive) was new in 2000 and still holds. Sonic Adventure moved the franchise to 3D before 3D was a solved problem, which means some of it works and the rest is Big the Cat and his fishing rod. Space Channel 5 is a rhythm game where a space-age news reporter defeats invading aliens by dancing and reporting simultaneously, voiced in the English version by Michael Jackson. That sentence is accurate.

Shenmue is the outlier. Yu Suzuki made an open-world game in 1999 that tracked time, weather, and NPC schedules. Ryo Hazuki walks through Yokosuka asking people if they've seen a man in a black car. It's slow. It takes three hours to get on a boat. It cost more to develop than any game had ever cost at that point, and it didn't sell enough to make that back. The follow-up is Shenmue II, and then Shenmue III in 2019 via Kickstarter, and the story still isn't finished. The Dreamcast might not have died if Shenmue had succeeded. It didn't succeed.

---

🔵 Hard: Games Built Around a Time Loop

Games: Outer Wilds · Returnal · The Forgotten City · Deathloop

These four are all time loop games, but they use the mechanic for different reasons and the differences matter.

Outer Wilds has a twenty-two-minute loop that ends with a supernova. You die. The loop resets. Everything you've learned carries forward but nothing you've done does. The design argument is that knowledge is the only currency, you're not grinding stats, you're building a map in your head of a solar system that was already dead before you arrived. It's a mystery about archaeology and deep time, and the ending only works once you understand what the loop is actually for. I'm not telling you what it's for.

Returnal uses the loop as roguelike structure. Selene crash-lands on a planet and keeps dying and waking up at the crash site. The loop here is about survival (running further each cycle, learning enemy patterns, getting better) but the lore underneath it is about guilt and the specific way we trap ourselves in our own narratives. It's punishing and beautiful.

The Forgotten City started as a Skyrim mod, became a standalone game, and is set in a Roman underground city where the Golden Rule is literal: if one person sins, everyone dies. You loop back. The game is almost entirely dialogue, you're solving a mystery by talking to people across repeated loops, each loop getting you closer to what actually happened. It won a BAFTA for best writing.

Deathloop is Arkane making a time loop into a playground. Colt needs to kill eight targets in a single day or the loop resets. The fun is optimization, figuring out the order, finding the shortcuts, realizing what the loop allows that a normal game wouldn't. Julianna hunting you from the other direction, potentially played by a real person online, is the best wrinkle.

---

🟣 Tricky: WORLD Appears in the Title

Games: Super Mario World · Another World · World of Goo · The World Ends with You

WORLD. In all four titles. Different positions: at the start (World of Goo), at the end (Super Mario World), in the middle (Another World), and buried inside a longer phrase (The World Ends with You). Different genres, different decades, different everything except that word.

Super Mario World launched the Super Nintendo and remains playable in a way that most games from 1990 are not. Another World (1991, by Éric Chahi, made almost entirely by one person) is a cinematic platformer with no HUD, no score, no health bar, just you and an alien world and the physics of what happens when you're small and the world is not. World of Goo is 2D Tower of Babel made of living goo balls. The World Ends with You is a DS action RPG with a dual-screen combat system, a Shibuya Underground setting, and a cult following that waited over a decade for the sequel.

Nothing connects them except the word.

---

The Dreamcast library is worth going back to if you haven't. Shenmue specifically is the kind of game that only makes sense if you let it work at its own pace, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on who you are.

Today's CineLinkr puzzle had an unreliable narrator group, four films where the story is told by someone lying to you. Same energy as a time loop where you can't trust what the previous cycle told you.