PixelLinkr #6: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Seaman (1999) is a Dreamcast game about a fish with a human face that lives in your tank and talks to you. You speak to it using the Dreamcast microphone. It asks you about your family, your job, the date, whether you fed it yesterday. It remembers your answers. If you haven't played in a few days it has opinions about that. There was a sequel on the DS in 2007 that sold poorly in the West. The voice of the original English version was Leonard Nimoy. I don't know what to do with any of this information but here we are.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Ubisoft Montreal

Games: Assassin's Creed II · Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time · Far Cry 3 · Child of Light

Ubisoft Montreal is the biggest game development studio in Canada, probably the biggest on the continent, and their best work came in a specific window that this group captures exactly.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) was the game that made you stop thinking of walls as barriers. The rewind mechanic could save you from a mistake you made two seconds ago. The parkour was physical and legible, you understood what your body could do and the levels were built around it. It still plays cleanly.

Assassin's Creed II (2009) is where the series became what it promised to be: Renaissance Florence and Venice, Ezio Auditore's revenge arc, rooftop traversal as a genuine expression of mobility. The modern framing with Desmond is questionable. The historical stuff is why people kept buying sequels for a decade.

Far Cry 3 (2012) is the one with Vaas. The main story goes weird places and the open world format was starting to show its own seams, but Vaas Montenegro is one of the most memorable antagonists of that generation. Child of Light (2014) is the anomaly in the group: a small watercolor RPG poem about a girl in a fairy tale kingdom. It's unusually beautiful and unusually quiet for a Ubisoft product, and it suggests the studio could have gone in a different direction if they'd wanted to.

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🟡 Medium: Published by Annapurna Interactive

Games: Stray · What Remains of Edith Finch · Neon White · Cocoon

Annapurna Interactive is the games division of film studio Annapurna Pictures, and it functions less like a traditional publisher and more like a cultural argument: these are games worth existing, here is money to make them, we will not make you put loot boxes in them.

What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) won Best Narrative at The Game Awards. You walk through a crumbling family home and experience the deaths of your relatives one by one, each told in a different interactive format. One of them involves a boy who spent his last moments in a bathtub creating an endless fantasy while performing an action his body completes automatically and mechanically. It's the most formally interesting depiction of dissociation I've encountered in the medium. Stray (2022) gives you a cat in a cyberpunk city of robots. It is exactly as charming as that sounds and slightly more melancholy.

Neon White (2022) is a speedrunning game framed as an anime about assassins in heaven, which sounds like too many things but lands. The card mechanic forces you to choose between your gun and your movement. Every level takes between ten and ninety seconds and you will spend forty minutes on some of them. Cocoon (2023) is a puzzle game from the lead designer of Inside about carrying worlds-as-orbs inside other worlds. It has no text, no dialogue, and is the most elegant puzzle design of its year.

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🔵 Hard: Games Where Taking Photos Is Core Play

Games: Pokémon Snap · Fatal Frame · TOEM · Viewfinder

The camera as weapon. The camera as tool. The camera as the only way to interact with what's in front of you.

Pokémon Snap (1999) is a rail shooter where you ride a cart through safari-style environments photographing Pokémon. Your goal is the best angle, the right behavior, the rare pose. It's a game about attention, you learn what each Pokémon will do and position yourself to capture it. New Pokémon Snap came out in 2021 and is essentially the same game with better creatures and it's equally good.

Fatal Frame (2001) is the one where the camera fights back. You are in a haunted house. The ghosts will kill you. The Camera Obscura lets you see and damage spirits, but to do that you have to frame them in your viewfinder and hold still while they approach. The fear is the camera mechanic. Getting closer to something terrifying because the photo is better that way is both the strategy and the horror.

TOEM (2021) is charming and small: a hand-drawn journey where you complete quests by photographing specific things in each town. The camera is a social tool, you use it to help people, to meet requirements, to document things that matter. It has zero threat and approximately maximum warmth. Viewfinder (2023) is structurally different: you take photos (or use found images) and place them in the game world, where they become three-dimensional environments. The photo you take of a bridge can be placed to create a bridge. It's a puzzle game about perspective and what framing can make real.

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🟣 Tricky: Games That Use Voice or Microphone as Input

Games: Seaman · Lifeline · Hey You, Pikachu! · Tom Clancy's EndWar

This category collected four games that trusted players to say words aloud at their consoles, which was always a proposition that required significant faith in the ambient quiet of living rooms.

Hey You, Pikachu! (1998) was Nintendo 64, a microphone accessory, and commands like "Pikachu, come here!" or "Pikachu, don't eat that!" directed at a virtual Pikachu who did not reliably understand. Lifeline (2003) was a PS2 game where you played as a character giving voice commands to a flight attendant trapped with you in a space station. The recognition worked about 70% of the time. It was reviewed with affection and anxiety in equal measure.

Tom Clancy's EndWar (2008) is the one that actually worked: a real-time strategy game where voice commands replaced buttons entirely. "Riflemen 3, move to Echo-7." It was understood as a proof of concept that the genre could work with voice on consoles, and then the concept did not spread further.

Seaman requires its own sentence. Leonard Nimoy narrates. A fish with a human face questions your life choices. You will feel watched.

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The camera category from today's puzzle is the one that keeps expanding in my head, there's something about reframing the camera from passive record to active tool that keeps generating new game ideas. Viewfinder is the most recent argument that there's still unexplored territory there.

Today's CineLinkr puzzle had Denzel Washington across his moral spectrum, Scarlett Johansson's Woody Allen period, time loops, and con artists. Completely different uses of the camera.