PixelLinkr #7: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Bionic Commando, the NES original (1988), has a rule that seems made up the first time you hear it: the protagonist cannot jump. His entire mobility is built around a bionic arm that fires a grappling hook. Later entries in the series explain this as a medical condition. The 2009 reboot explains it differently and the explanation is one of the strangest story decisions in major-release game history. I will not spoil it. You should look it up after you finish the game, or maybe before, because your eyebrows will behave unusually and you might want privacy.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Housemarque

Games: Alienation · Matterfall · Nex Machina · Resogun

Housemarque is a Finnish studio founded in 1995 that spent twenty-five years making deeply excellent twin-stick arcade shooters for small-to-medium audiences, and then in 2021 made Returnal and became PlayStation's most talked-about studio overnight.

Resogun (2013) launched with the PS4. It was a side-scrolling shooter about flying a ship around cylindrical levels, saving humans, destroying everything else. The voxel destruction engine made every explosion satisfying in a way that was new. It was a launch title that actually made you want the hardware. Alienation (2016) moved the angle overhead: top-down twin-stick shooter, procedural loot, three classes, four-player co-op. Nex Machina (2017) came from a collaboration with Eugene Jarvis, who made Robotron: 2084, and it shows: it's a love letter to arcade machine design principles applied with modern resolution and effects. Matterfall (2017) is the least celebrated of the four but still has the Housemarque feel, precision over chaos, systems that reward mastery.

Returnal (2021) was something different: a third-person roguelike with bullet hell combat and a genuinely strange narrative. It landed on a PS5 whose catalog needed it badly, and it proved the studio could scale up without losing the craft.

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🟡 Medium: First Released on Game Boy Advance

Games: Mother 3 · Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga · Golden Sun · WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!

The Game Boy Advance ran from 2001 to 2008 and the quality of its JRPG and puzzle library is not fully appreciated, partly because handheld games in that era operated below the critical radar and partly because Mother 3 still hasn't had an official Western release and many people don't know what they missed.

Mother 3 (2006) (released in Japan only) is the sequel to EarthBound that Shigesato Itoi worked on for a decade. It involves a family in a village called Tazmily, an invading army with mechanical monsters, chimeras, a villain whose motivation you don't fully understand until the end, and a battle system built around musical rhythm. It has the most emotionally devastating ending in the mainline Nintendo catalog and they have never officially translated it. A fan translation from 2008 remains the standard.

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2003) is genuinely funny (the writing is sharp and the combat timing system rewards attention. Golden Sun (2001) was a full JRPG with Djinn collection, Psynergy puzzles, and a story that ended on a cliffhanger that wasn't resolved until Golden Sun: The Lost Age the following year. WarioWare, Inc. (2003) is five-second microgames, a timer, and pure arcade reflex) the game that started a franchise that is still running and still good.

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🔵 Hard: Live-Action FMV / Interactive Film Games

Games: Telling Lies · Immortality · Erica · Late Shift

The FMV game had two distinct phases. The first was 1993-1996, when CD-ROM storage let developers put actual video into games and they did that immediately and enthusiastically and often poorly. Night Trap. Mad Dog McCree. Phantasmagoria. The second phase is currently ongoing and produces far better work.

Late Shift (2016) and Erica (2019) are the conventional interactive film entries: branching narrative, filmed with professional casts, choices that affect outcomes. They're competent and enjoyable. Erica uses a touch interface (DualShock touchpad or phone companion app) to make your interactions physical rather than menu-based, which changes the relationship to the choices in ways that are worth noticing.

Telling Lies (2019) and Immortality (2022) are Sam Barlow, and Sam Barlow is doing something different. Telling Lies gives you a laptop full of NSA surveillance footage, two-person conversations recorded from one side only. You search by keyword and piece together a story from fragments. The work is archaeological and the narrative rewards patience. Immortality is the furthest the format has gone: a database of film footage spanning three unmade films across different decades, featuring the same actress. The interface is a film projector. You find connections by examining frames. It won multiple Game of the Year categories from critics and will be remembered as the moment the FMV game became something more than a novelty.

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🟣 Tricky: Traversal Built Around a Grapple or Prosthetic Tether

Games: Bionic Commando · Just Cause 3 · A Story About My Uncle · Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

These four games agree that moving through space is the game, and they each have a different answer for what that movement feels like.

Bionic Commando (1988/2009) is the NES original and its modern remake: a protagonist with a mechanical arm who swings, hooks, and pulls because jumping is medically unavailable to him. The constraint generated a movement vocabulary that still feels distinctive. Just Cause 3 (2015) is the opposite of constraint: tether anything to anything, infinite grapple range, a wingsuit to bridge the gaps. The world is a physics sandbox and the grapple is the primary tool for building absurdity.

A Story About My Uncle (2014) is a first-person grapple platformer with a gentle story told in voice-over. The physics are loose and the level design is built around momentum and arc. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019) makes the grapple precise: a shinobi prosthetic that can reach specific attachment points, used to close vertical distance instantly, to escape pressure, to reposition mid-combat. The combat system is already demanding. The grapple is what makes the map not feel like an obstacle. Wolf doesn't swim well for structural reasons that eventually become clear.

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The FMV category is doing real work now in ways it wasn't in the 90s. Immortality's formal innovation (using the act of examining film frames as an interface metaphor) is the kind of thing that gets studied in game design programs. The interactivity isn't about choices, it's about attention.

Today's CineLinkr puzzle had Hitchcock's four essential films, animated Oscar winners, Hans Zimmer's unexpected credits, and colors hiding in titles. Hitchcock knew about grappling with confined spaces too, Rear Window barely leaves an apartment.