PixelLinkr #44: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Cave Story is the obvious opening note for this board, because it is the game that taught a whole generation of indie players to keep one eye on the credits. The first ending is short, melancholy, and entirely real, in the sense that the game stops and rolls credits and you can absolutely set the controller down and be done. The second ending exists only if you noticed a single specific item earlier on. That is the kind of trick today's puzzle is built around, all the way down to the studios that made it.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Atlus

Games: Persona 3 Reload · Catherine · Shin Megami Tensei V · Soul Hackers 2

Atlus is one of those studios where the easy category lands easy because the house style is so loud. Persona 3 Reload is the modern remake of the high-school-meets-Tartarus JRPG that effectively launched the modern Persona era. Shin Megami Tensei V is the parent series, harder, weirder, and considerably less interested in dating sim rhythms. Soul Hackers 2 is the spinoff revival that mostly satisfied fans of the late-90s original without setting the world on fire.

Catherine is the row's wildcard. It is a block-pushing nightmare puzzle about a man cheating on his girlfriend with a girl who may or may not be a demon, and it has almost nothing in common with the other three on the surface. The connection is just the developer logo. That logo, however, has done a lot of heavy lifting in JRPG circles for two decades now.

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🟡 Medium: Survival horror games

Games: Resident Evil 2 · Silent Hill 2 · The Evil Within · Signalis

Survival horror is one of those genre labels that gets argued about more than it gets defined, but the four games here are about as close to a textbook quartet as you can get. Resident Evil 2, in its 2019 remake form, kept the original's resource scarcity and police-station geography while modernizing almost everything else. Silent Hill 2 is the 2001 PS2 original, the foggy small-town nightmare that most discussions of psychological horror in games still circle back to.

The Evil Within is Shinji Mikami, the man who basically invented the genre, taking another swing in 2014 with a denser, more violent take. Signalis is the youngest of the four, a 2022 indie that essentially rebuilt the classic Resident Evil camera and inventory systems on a moodier sci-fi frame. Different decades, different studios, same basic deal: limited bullets, limited saves, and a lot of corridors you do not want to walk down.

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🔵 Hard: Almost entirely set in a single house

Games: Gone Home · Maniac Mansion · Luigi's Mansion · The 7th Guest

Gone Home is the cleanest example here. The whole game is one young woman walking through her own family's empty house and reconstructing what happened from the objects left behind. Maniac Mansion is the granddaddy of the row, the 1987 LucasArts adventure that was the first game built on the SCUMM engine and is set entirely inside one extremely strange mansion belonging to one extremely strange family.

Luigi's Mansion is the GameCube launch title that gave Nintendo's second banana his own haunted house and a vacuum cleaner instead of a jump button, and the whole game stays inside the building. The 7th Guest is the early-90s FMV puzzle game that helped sell CD-ROM drives by trapping you inside a haunted mansion for hours of full-motion video weirdness. Four games, one architectural floor plan each, no field trips.

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🟣 Tricky: The credits roll, then the real game begins

Games: Cave Story · Bravely Default · Pokemon Silver · Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

This is the spoiler row, and it is also the most fun row to have solved correctly. Cave Story stages a complete bittersweet ending and only opens its true final chapter if you grabbed a specific item earlier. Bravely Default's mid-game pivot is so unexpected that the developers reportedly worried players would put the game down before reaching it, which is the kind of design risk you do not see often.

Pokemon Silver is the entry that turned this trick into a generational memory. You beat the Elite Four, you watch the credits, and then you discover the entire Kanto region is sitting there waiting for you, eight more gyms and a final climb up Mount Silver included. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness handles it differently again, with a postgame that contains arguably more content than the main story and a leveling ceiling that mostly just laughs at you. Four games, four different ways of saying "you thought you were done."

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If you finished the game board and want a second round, today's CineLinkr puzzle is also live. Same format, very different shelves to pull from.