PixelLinkr #9: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Driver: San Francisco (2011) is a game where you play a comatose detective who, while unconscious, can project his mind into any other driver on the map. You shift between bodies mid-chase. You can inhabit the person you're chasing. You can take over a bus and park it in front of a fleeing car. The game acknowledges, explicitly and early, that all of this is occurring in a coma dream. It does not stop doing it. It is one of the best games Ubisoft ever made and it is not available digitally because of licensing issues with the car manufacturers. Physical copies are in demand.
🟢 Easy: Developed by Naughty Dog
Games: Crash Bandicoot · Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy · Uncharted 2: Among Thieves · The Last of Us
Naughty Dog is one studio with three completely separate identities, and the four games here represent the transition points between them.
Crash Bandicoot (1996) is the mascot era: a response to Sonic and Mario that was physically impossible on anything before the PS1. Tight 3D platforming, tight hitboxes, crates, wumpa fruit. The studio made four Crash games in three years. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) was the clean-break sequel franchise: open world, RPG elements, a warmer visual style. The Jak series darkened significantly by Jak II (2003) and Jak 3 (2004), introducing gun combat and a dystopian city. The transition from Crash to Jak shows a studio pushing against its comfort zone.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009) was the beginning of the cinematic Naughty Dog, Nathan Drake, set-piece design, motion capture dialogue, a train sequence that remains one of the benchmark images of that console generation. The Last of Us (2013) took that cinematic ambition and stripped out the levity: Joel, Ellie, a twenty-year pandemic, a cross-country journey with a moral argument baked into its ending that people are still arguing about. One studio, three eras, completely different audiences for each while still being the same studio.
🟡 Medium: Roguelike Deck-Building Games
Games: Slay the Spire · Monster Train · Griftlands · Inscryption
Slay the Spire (2019) is the game that made the roguelike deck-builder a genre. The structure it established (ascending a tower, three character classes with unique card pools, relic upgrades, branching paths, incremental run-to-run learning) became a template that over a hundred subsequent games adopted directly. The design clarity is difficult to overstate.
Monster Train (2020) took the template and added tower defense structure: your train is moving; you're placing units on multiple floors to stop enemies from reaching your pyre. The dual-vertical-layers created combination possibilities Slay the Spire didn't have. Griftlands (2021) from Klei (makers of Don't Starve) added dialogue and reputation decks, you maintain separate card pools for negotiation and combat, and story decisions affect both. It's the most narrative-forward of the genre.
Inscryption (2021) is the mutation. It starts as a deck-builder in a dark cabin with an ominous opponent across the table. It stops being that. The game has multiple layers and the outer layers comment on the inner ones and describing it further ruins it. It won Game of the Year from multiple outlets. It belongs in the genre but the genre cannot contain it.
🔵 Hard: Games With Direct Time-Control Powers
Games: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time · Blinx: The Time Sweeper · TimeShift · Quantum Break
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) is the prototype: a rewind ability that lets you undo a death or a failed jump. The mechanic is elegant because it acknowledges fallibility without removing stakes, you can only rewind so far before the dagger is empty, and you only have so many charges. The combat has time-slow abilities too, but the rewind is the one that changed how action games thought about death.
Blinx: The Time Sweeper (2002) was Microsoft's Xbox mascot attempt: a cat with a vacuum cleaner that could record, slow, reverse, or pause time. The time mechanics were interesting. The game around them was less successful. Microsoft retired Blinx as a mascot quickly. He appears on a poster in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts in what may be a mild dig.
TimeShift (2007) gave the player three time abilities (slow, stop, reverse) and built a shooter around them. The execution was competent but the genre was crowded. Quantum Break (2016) is the Remedy entry, tying a television show to the game structure: Jack Joyce develops time-control powers during a time travel experiment gone wrong. The powers (time stop, time dodge, time shield) were built around the cover shooter format in ways Sands of Time's powers weren't. The live-action episode segments vary in quality. The game sections are good.
🟣 Tricky: Games Built Around Possessing or Inhabiting Other Bodies
Games: Geist · Messiah · Driver: San Francisco · Super Mario Odyssey
These four made body-hopping a mechanical system rather than a narrative event.
Messiah (2000) is one of the earliest: you play as a cherub who can dive into human bodies, use their physical abilities and weapons, and abandon them when convenient or when they're killed. The level design was built around figuring out which body you needed and where to find it. Geist (2005) is GameCube exclusivity: a ghost who gradually gains the ability to possess human enemies, animals, and objects. The possession mechanics were more puzzle-oriented than combat-oriented; you'd possess a mouse to access ventilation shafts, then possess a human on the other side.
Super Mario Odyssey (2017) invented Cappy: Mario's hat, thrown to capture and control enemies, objects, and NPCs. Capturing a Bullet Bill to fly across a gap. Capturing a Chain Chomp and aiming it. Capturing a T-rex and running through walls. The capture mechanic turned the world into a question: what can I use, and what becomes possible when I use it? It won Game of the Year from multiple outlets.
Driver: San Francisco (2011) does the same thing in a car game with a detective in a coma. The shift mechanic makes every vehicle on the map a potential tool. The game knows it's absurd. It leans into the absurdity until the absurdity becomes the emotional core.
The deck-builder category is the fastest-growing genre of the last five years and Slay the Spire is the reason. It took a collectible card game format and removed everything that made CCGs expensive and socially demanding, no opponents, no money for packs, no meta grinding. Just your run, your cards, your decisions. The roguelike structure made every failed run feel like learning. That design combination turned out to have extremely wide appeal.
Today's CineLinkr puzzle had Scorsese's full range, the Stephen King Oscar, fabricated realities, and Shakespeare hiding in teen comedies and 1950s sci-fi. Forbidden Planet is the most surprising film in that group.