PixelLinkr #37: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 added the revert, and if you were the right age that mechanical change quietly rewired your brain. Suddenly a vert landing did not end the combo. It was just a hinge. This board kept circling that same pleasure: motion that carries over, systems that remember what happened a second ago, and games that only really click when you stop treating each part as separate.

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🟢 Easy: Skateboarding games

Games: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 · Skate 2 · Session: Skate Sim · Thrasher: Skate and Destroy

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is the arcade monarch here. It is fast, rude, and built around the glorious lie that you can keep a combo alive forever if your fingers deserve it. Thrasher: Skate and Destroy feels grubbier and meaner. It comes from the late-1990s stretch where skate culture in games had not yet been sanded down for mass-market friendliness, and that roughness is half the charm.

Skate 2 flips the fantasy. The board has weight, the tricks need setup, and the city feels like a place you learn instead of a pinball table you exploit. Session pushes that even further until every line feels hand-built. I like the row because it shows how much room there is inside one sport. Skateboarding in games can be score attack, street simulation, or pure attitude.

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🟡 Medium: Progress depends on swapping between multiple characters

Games: The Lost Vikings · Trine · Thomas Was Alone · Day of the Tentacle

The Lost Vikings is still a beautiful blunt instrument. Erik can jump, Baleog can fight, Olaf can block and glide, and the whole game is the repeated discovery that one body is never enough. Trine softens the same idea into something prettier and more fluid, but the underlying grammar is similar. You solve problems by asking which character the room wants right now.

Day of the Tentacle turns the swap into comedy architecture. Three characters, three time periods, one enormous chain of cause and effect. Thomas Was Alone is the curveball, because its cast are rectangles and squares with narrator-assisted personalities, but it still belongs. The puzzle logic depends on reading each shape as a different body with a different use. The nice thing about the group is that it catches both literal character-switching and the broader idea of treating a team as a single move set.

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🔵 Hard: Other players leave ghosts, messages, or structures behind

Games: Demon's Souls · Dark Souls · Journey · Nioh

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls changed how lonely a lonely game could feel. Bloodstains, messages, ghostly phantoms, all of it turns the map into a rumor mill. You are alone, except not really. Somebody failed here. Somebody warned you about that chest. Somebody thought it was funny to lie.

Journey strips the idea down until it becomes almost tender. Another player appears, you chirp at each other, you maybe stay together, you maybe do not, and the game refuses to flatten the encounter into the usual multiplayer noise. It is one of the smartest uses of anonymity games have ever found.

Nioh does the harsher version. Grave markers are not just traces. They are invitations to fight the dead. That makes the whole category snap into focus. These games use other players as atmosphere, instruction, bait, and threat. The medium-specific thrill here is that the world keeps evidence of human passage without turning into a lobby.

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🟣 Tricky: Boss rush is the whole design

Games: Furi · Titan Souls · Eldest Souls · Alien Soldier

Furi announces its priorities with almost rude clarity. Walk down a corridor. Meet a monster. Learn the rhythm. Lose. Try again. The boss is the level. Titan Souls is even more stripped down. One arrow, one mistake, usually one panic spiral.

Eldest Souls belongs because it understands the same contract. You are here for duels, timing windows, pattern recognition, and the small sick feeling of realizing phase two exists. Alien Soldier is the surprise entry if you mainly know it as a Treasure oddity, but the thing barely pretends to be anything else. It keeps throwing bosses at you until the game starts to feel like a dare.

That is why the row works as purple instead of blue for me. The aha is noticing that these games did not build toward boss fights. They built outward from them. Everything else is scaffolding.

The boss-rush row is probably the one I would replay first, mostly because there is something admirable about a game that states its business that bluntly. If you want the movie version of directors making a formal choice and going all in on it, today's CineLinkr ends with four films that treated 3D as something worth arguing about.