PixelLinkr #5: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Tunic puts you in a game world with a manual. The manual exists inside the game as a collectible item. The manual is written in an invented script you can't read. You decode the script over the course of the game's twenty or so hours, and by the end you can read it, and then you go back and read everything you picked up early that you couldn't understand yet. That's the game. That's also today's hard category.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Rare

Games: Banjo-Kazooie · Perfect Dark · Viva Piñata · Sea of Thieves

Rare in 1998 was one of the most respected developers in the world: GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country, Perfect Dark all within a few years of each other on Nintendo platforms. Then Microsoft acquired them in 2002 for $375 million, and the next decade was complicated.

Banjo-Kazooie (1998) is peak N64 collect-a-thon: a bear with a bird in his backpack navigating musical-themed worlds, collecting notes, stopping a witch from stealing a girl's beauty. The sequels exist. This one is the one.

Perfect Dark (2000) is what GoldenEye wanted to become: longer campaign, deeper multiplayer, a female protagonist, a fully realized sci-fi world. It maxed out the N64 hardware and required the memory expansion pak to run. It's still impressive procedurally and functionally superseded its predecessor.

Viva Piñata (2006) was Rare's Xbox 360 attempt to make something warm and pastoral, a garden game about attracting, taming, and breeding piñata animals. Sea of Thieves won BAFTA's Evolving Game award in 2021, which is what happens when a live service game keeps improving past its rough launch into something genuinely loved. Neither of these is the game you'd name first if someone asked about Rare's legacy, but they're both better than the studio's reputation in the Microsoft era suggests.

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🟡 Medium: PlayStation 2 Launch Titles

Games: Tekken Tag Tournament · Ridge Racer V · SSX · TimeSplitters

October 26, 2000 (Japan), March 4, 2001 (North America). Four games from that shelf.

Tekken Tag Tournament was technically a revision of Tekken 3 with tag mechanics bolted on and the graphical headroom that the PS2 offered. It looked extraordinary compared to anything that had been in your living room before it. Ridge Racer V was the racing game slot, a launch tradition Namco had maintained since the original PlayStation.

SSX was the one that surprised people. A snowboarding game with over-the-top tricks, a roster of distinct characters, and a visual style that felt genuinely current. It outsold several more anticipated launch titles. The series that followed it (SSX Tricky, SSX 3) became genuinely beloved.

TimeSplitters is the one that belongs in a different conversation. It was made almost entirely by Free Radical Design, many of whom had come from Rare after making GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. TimeSplitters had time travel, a broad cast of over a hundred characters, and a single-player campaign that mattered less than the multiplayer, which is to say the multiplayer was excellent. The franchise quietly disappeared after the third entry. The people involved have been trying to revive it ever since.

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🔵 Hard: Fictional Language Is a Major Puzzle Element

Games: Heaven's Vault · Chants of Sennaar · Tunic · 7 Days to End with You

I'll say it plainly: these four games are asking for something specific from you. They want you to sit with confusion, accumulate guesses, and build understanding from pattern recognition alone. No dictionary. No translation toggle. You either engage with that or the game is gone from you.

Heaven's Vault (2019, Inkle Studios) is a 2D adventure game about an archaeologist deciphering an ancient language from inscriptions and artifacts. You make guesses about what words mean based on context, and the game tracks whether you're right. The language is fully constructed (Inkle built over a thousand words) and you interact with maybe a third of them. The story is archaeological and melancholy and the language work makes it feel like real research.

Chants of Sennaar (2023) is the one that most purely makes language its entire mechanical premise. You reach a tower with incomprehensible inhabitants, each floor a different language, and you decode each language's glyph system from context before moving on. It feels like linguistic fieldwork. It's gentle and focused and I think about it more than I expected to.

Tunic hides its action-adventure structure inside a game-within-a-game: you're collecting pages of an in-universe manual written in a runic script. The script is real (a transliteration of English phonemes) and the community decoded it completely. The game works without decoding it. The game rewards decoding it. There's a level of secret underneath the language that goes further than anyone expected.

7 Days to End with You is the most emotionally bare: you wake up with amnesia in a house with a person you apparently know. They speak a language you don't recognize. You have seven days. The language is not decodable through pattern-matching the way the other three are, it's more impressionistic, more about emotional register than semantic precision. The ending earns it.

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🟣 Tricky: Title Starts with a Number Word

Games: OneShot · Two Point Hospital · Four Last Things · Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

ONE-SHOT, TWO Point, FOUR Last Things, ZERO Escape. Number words, first position, nothing else in common.

OneShot is a puzzle adventure game about a child holding a lightbulb that is the world's last light source. It addresses you directly (not your in-game character, you) and it does things with your computer's files and windows that I'm not going to describe because discovering them is better. Two Point Hospital is the spiritual successor to Theme Hospital: build and manage a hospital that treats absurd fictional diseases. Four Last Things is a point-and-click adventure game built entirely from Renaissance paintings that somehow becomes a meditation on sin and absolution. Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward is a visual novel about nine people locked in an escape room killing game that folds time travel and moral philosophy into what looks like a puzzle game.

The number is in the title. That's the whole thing.

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The language games group is the one from today's puzzle I keep returning to. Chants of Sennaar in particular does something understated: by the time you finish decoding the last floor's language, you've been through four different linguistic systems with four different emotional registers, and the tower's hierarchy becomes visible through what each language was and wasn't allowed to say. It's brilliant without announcing that it's brilliant.

Today's CineLinkr puzzle had Morgan Freeman, Tom Hanks, sports underdogs, and one very bad night in Manhattan. Different kind of language, same requirement to stay with it.