PixelLinkr #4: The Story Behind the Puzzle

At the Xbox 360 launch in November 2005, Microsoft was selling you on the promise of high-definition gaming. The launch titles included Perfect Dark Zero, the sequel to one of the best shooters on the N64, and Condemned: Criminal Origins, a first-person horror game about fighting homeless people with a lead pipe. HD gaming was here, and it looked like this.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Supergiant Games

Games: Bastion · Transistor · Pyre · Hades

Supergiant is seven to ten people making games that look and sound like they required a much larger team. They haven't made a bad game. That's not a backhanded compliment. Four games, each one critically excellent, each one formally distinct from the last.

Bastion (2011) introduced the Logan Cunningham narrator, a voice that describes what the Kid is doing as you do it. It shouldn't feel immersive and it does. Transistor (2014) is noir science fiction, a woman on the run with a weapon that contains a consciousness, turn-based combat hidden inside real-time action. Darker. More willing to let you be confused.

Pyre (2017) is the strange one: a fantasy sports RPG where you're managing a team of exiles competing in mystical rites, with dialogue choices that affect character arcs. It refuses to let you see everyone get a good ending. The game physically cannot give everyone what they want, and you choose who loses.

Hades (2020) won multiple Game of the Year awards and Darren Korb, who composed the soundtrack, also voices the protagonist. Zagreus is trying to escape the underworld. He keeps dying. Each run builds relationships with the NPCs in the hub area, and those relationships change based on how many times you've died and what you've learned. The roguelike structure becomes a character-development structure. Pyre made the same argument about consequence; Hades made it feel like love.

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🟡 Medium: Xbox 360 Launch Titles

Games: Perfect Dark Zero · Kameo: Elements of Power · Project Gotham Racing 3 · Condemned: Criminal Origins

November 22, 2005. Four games from that shelf.

Perfect Dark Zero was the flagship, Rare making the sequel to Perfect Dark, which was itself a successor to GoldenEye. The result was a game that looked technically impressive in 2005 and played like it had been designed by committee under deadline pressure. It sold on hype and aged poorly. Kameo: Elements of Power was a fantasy action game also from Rare, cheerful and polished, appreciated by the people who played it and largely forgotten by everyone else.

Project Gotham Racing 3 was the racing game you pointed at when people asked what HD gaming looked like. The car models were the demonstration. The actual racing was good. Condemned: Criminal Origins was Monolith Productions making the best launch title by some margin: psychological horror, first-person melee combat with improvised weapons, an increasingly disturbing story about a serial killer investigation. It ran at 720p and scared people more than anything on the shelf.

Rare had two games in this launch lineup and neither fulfilled the GoldenEye legacy everyone was hoping for. That was a recurring theme.

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🔵 Hard: Played Through an In-World Computer Interface

Games: Papers, Please · Her Story · Orwell · Hypnospace Outlaw

These four games make you sit at a computer inside the game. The fictional desk is the medium.

Papers, Please (2013) puts you at a Soviet-style border checkpoint in the fictional country of Arstotzka. Your job is to check documents. Are the papers in order? Is the visa expired? Is the photo wrong? The rules get more complicated every day and the queue never stops. You're paid by processed applicant. The game is about bureaucratic complicity, the way systems make ordinary people into instruments of harm one rubber stamp at a time. It's oppressive and brilliant.

Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015) is a police database. You search for words. Each search returns video clips of a woman being interviewed after a crime. You build the story from fragments. There is no set order and no tutorial. The narrative assembles itself as you find more clips. It is entirely possible to watch the ending clip before you know why it's the ending.

Orwell puts you in the role of a state surveillance analyst. You're reading a suspect's social media, emails, and private messages and flagging information to upload to a government profile. The tension is that you choose what gets flagged. The system acts on your choices. The game makes sure you feel the weight of that.

Hypnospace Outlaw is set inside a 1999-era internet service. You're a moderation volunteer. The internet looks like Geocities made by fever dream. You ban people for copyright violations, scam operations, and general wrongness. It's funny and nostalgic and quietly devastating by the end.

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🟣 Tricky: Cardinal Direction in the Title

Games: Northgard · Eastward · West of Loathing · South Park: The Stick of Truth

NORTH. EAST. WEST. SOUTH. The four directions, four different games, nothing else in common.

Northgard is a Viking RTS. Eastward is a 2021 pixel-art RPG with a father-son story and some of the best sprite work in recent memory. West of Loathing is a stick-figure comedy RPG set in the Wild West, filled with jokes that go about four beats past where anyone expected them to go. South Park: The Stick of Truth is the one where Trey Parker and Matt Stone basically wrote a 15-hour South Park episode and Obsidian designed the turn-based combat system around it, which is a sentence I still find surprising.

Nothing connects the content. Point a compass at each title and it works once.

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Supergiant's track record with four-for-four on critically acclaimed games from a studio that small is genuinely unusual. The closest comparison is probably Fumito Ueda making Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian, but with faster delivery and more staff.

Today's CineLinkr puzzle had a group of Nolan films and a group of Villeneuve films, two directors who ask audiences to be patient with complex structures. Papers, Please asks the same thing.