PixelLinkr #46: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Metal Gear Solid 2 shipped in November 2001 with Solid Snake on every box, every trailer, every magazine cover, and every storefront poster. Then the tanker prologue ended, the camera cut, and you were playing a barefoot rookie named Raiden for the next twenty hours. Hideo Kojima had spent two years deliberately misleading every marketing partner Konami had, and the rage from the player base was so intense that the game has only really been understood, on its own terms, in the last decade. The bait-and-switch is the point. You were never supposed to feel comfortable.

🟢 Easy: Developed by Capcom

Games: Resident Evil 4 · Street Fighter II · Mega Man X · Monster Hunter: World

Capcom is the developer that has reinvented itself the most times without losing its identity. Roughly every decade they ship a sequel that quietly redefines a genre, and four of those sequels are in this category.

Street Fighter II (1991) is the one that essentially invented the modern fighting game. The cancel-into-special, the six-button layout, the character roster as identity. Every fighting game made since then is, in some way, a response to Street Fighter II. The arcade cabinets ate so many quarters that they paid for the next decade of Capcom's development.

Mega Man X (1993) is the SNES reinvention of the NES Mega Man formula. Faster, sharper, with a wall-jump and a dash that completely changes the level-traversal pace. The opening stage is one of the best-designed tutorials in the medium. It teaches you the entire game without telling you it is teaching you anything, including the secret that the boss intro sequence is itself winnable. Most people miss it on the first playthrough.

Resident Evil 4 (2005) is the over-the-shoulder reinvention that every third-person shooter since has copied. Shinji Mikami threw out the fixed camera, the tank controls, and the puzzle-box design philosophy from the previous games and built something that played more like an action-horror movie than a survival-horror sim. The game has been ported to roughly every platform that has ever existed and the 2023 remake is also excellent. The original is still the one to play.

Monster Hunter: World (2018) is the modern reinvention. The Monster Hunter series had been a Japan-dominant cult phenomenon on PSP and 3DS for fifteen years. World finally cracked the Western market by removing the loading zones, modernizing the controls, and shipping simultaneously on PS4 and Xbox One. It sold over twenty-five million copies. Capcom has never had a bigger Western hit.

🟡 Medium: Designed for couch co-op

Games: It Takes Two · A Way Out · Overcooked · Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

Couch co-op as a primary design pillar mostly died in the late 2000s. The industry pivoted to online multiplayer, splitscreen vanished from major releases, and the assumption became that your second player was on the internet. These four games refused that assumption.

It Takes Two (2021) is the modern flag-bearer. Hazelight built an entire mechanic-rotating campaign that requires two players, end to end, with no single-player mode at all. Every chapter introduces a new pair of mechanics that only function when both players cooperate. It won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. The fact that the game cannot be played alone was treated as a feature, not a marketing problem.

A Way Out (2018) is Hazelight's previous game and the proof of concept. A two-player splitscreen prison-break drama where the screen is always divided and the players are usually doing different things at the same time. The game ships with a friend pass, where buying one copy lets you play with someone who has not bought it. Josef Fares fought EA for that pricing decision. He won.

Overcooked (2016) is the chaotic kitchen game that became a small genre in itself. Two to four players running a restaurant kitchen across deliberately absurd geographies, including ice floes, moving trucks, and a haunted ship. The game is technically winnable. The game is also the leading cause of relationship arguments in Steam history. Both can be true.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (2015) is the deep cut. Asteroid Base built a co-op space-shooter where two players pilot the same starship, running between stations to operate guns, shields, and engines. One person flies, one person shoots, and you both fail when you forget to communicate. The art style is bright and friendly. The systems require constant negotiation. It works on the couch the way nothing else really does.

🔵 Hard: Immersive sims

Games: Deus Ex · Dishonored · Thief: The Dark Project · System Shock 2

The immersive sim is one of those genres that almost no one can define and everyone recognizes when they see one. The working definition is something like: a first-person game with overlapping, interlocking systems that the level designers prepared for, plus a few interactions they did not. You can sneak past the guard, hack the camera, drop through the vent, knock him out with a thrown bottle, or talk your way through. The game is built to support all of it.

Thief: The Dark Project (1998) is the foundational text. Looking Glass shipped it in 1998, and it is widely credited with inventing the first-person stealth genre. Its light and sound propagation systems were so detailed that level designers had to hand-tune every torch in every level. The game is famously unfriendly to combat. Garrett can fight a guard, but the fight will go badly, which is the point. You are a thief.

System Shock 2 (1999) is the next-year sibling, made by Looking Glass and the brand-new Irrational Games together. It hybridizes RPG progression, horror, and emergent systems into a template that Deus Ex, BioShock, and Prey all built directly on. SHODAN's voice is one of the best AI villain performances in the medium, and the audio logs format that the game popularized is now standard across the entire industry.

Deus Ex (2000) is Warren Spector's grand cyberpunk RPG that asks the player to do the thinking. The opening Liberty Island level can be solved in about a dozen distinct ways, and the level designers shipped the game knowing they had probably missed a few. The plot is a conspiracy thriller with strong views on the Trilateral Commission. The dialogue is the dialogue of a 2000 RPG, which is to say it is rough. The freedom of approach has not been bettered.

Dishonored (2012) is the modern revival. Arkane took the Thief / Deus Ex DNA, added blink-teleport and possession, and built an entire alternate-history city around the Chaos system that tracks how you play. Murder a lot of people and the city gets darker, the rats get bolder, and the ending changes accordingly. Most players, in 2012, did not know that the game was watching that closely. The endings hit harder when you find out.

🟣 Tricky: Swap protagonists partway through

Games: Grand Theft Auto V · Heavy Rain · The Last of Us Part II · Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Each of these games hands you a main character, lets you settle in, then yanks the controller and asks you to play as somebody else. The trick keeps working because the games keep finding new reasons to do it.

Grand Theft Auto V (2013) does the rotation as a feature, not a twist. Three protagonists, switchable on the fly via a radial menu, with each character continuing his own life when you cut away. Trevor's introduction in particular is staged as a structural rug-pull. You spend the first chapter as Michael, the second as Franklin, then the camera pans up from a corpse in the desert and there is Trevor, and the entire tonal register of the game changes in one cut.

Heavy Rain (2010) rotates between four playable leads across a single mystery, and any of them can die permanently mid-story without ending the game. The cast list at the credits depends on who you kept alive. Quantic Dream's QTE-heavy interaction model has aged poorly in some places, and the writing has aged better than people give it credit for. The shower scene jokes have outlasted the discourse around them. The actual plot is more interesting than the discourse suggested.

The Last of Us Part II (2020) is the controversial one, and the controversy is exactly because of how the protagonist swap is staged. After roughly ten hours of playing as Ellie, the game cuts back to the start of the story and asks you to spend the next ten hours playing as Abby, the woman Ellie has been hunting the entire game. The whole structure is a moral test the player either accepts or rejects, and a lot of the discourse around the game is really discourse about whether you accept the structural argument. Naughty Dog has been firm: the structure is the point.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) is the one in the opener. Solid Snake on every box, on every poster, in every trailer, then Raiden for the rest of the game. Hideo Kojima has said in interviews that the entire purpose was to make the player experience exactly what Raiden experiences: the discomfort of being an inadequate stand-in for someone the world expects you to be. The game is, in retrospect, one of the most prescient critiques of media-saturated identity in the medium. Nobody understood that in 2001. Almost everybody understands it now.

The four protagonist-swap games share a structural courage that almost no other big-budget title is willing to risk. Asking the player to root for the wrong person is one of the hardest things a writer can do. These games do it on purpose.

If you also play CineLinkr, today's puzzle is over at cinelinkr.com/puzzle/2026-05-16.