PixelLinkr #47: The Story Behind the Puzzle

NieR: Automata's true ending asks you to delete your save file to help another player. There is no take-backs prompt, no recovery option, no warning that you should think about it. Yoko Taro's argument is that meaningful sacrifice in a game has to actually cost you something, and the only thing a player has that the game can ask for is the save data itself. Most players hesitate. A lot of them say no. The ones who say yes lose dozens of hours of progress and gain nothing tangible in return except a credits sequence about a stranger they will never meet. The game is asking a real question. The answer is harder than it sounds.

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🟢 Easy: Developed by Bethesda Game Studios

Games: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim · Fallout 3 · Fallout 4 · Starfield

Bethesda Game Studios has a house style that nobody else has been able to replicate, partly because the strengths and the weaknesses are inseparable. The world is huge, the systems are interlocking, the side quests outnumber the main quest by a factor of fifty, and the engine is haunted. Take any one of those out and you do not have a Bethesda game.

Skyrim (2011) is the canonical example and the most-ported game of the last fifteen years. Todd Howard has put it on every platform Bethesda owns the rights to, including a smart fridge at one point as a joke that turned out to be real. The game's cultural footprint is the entire selling point. Twenty thousand mods, an active speedrun scene, and a dragon-shouting protagonist that you can roleplay as a sneak archer, a vampire lord, a werewolf, or just a guy who wanders into Whiterun and never leaves.

Fallout 3 (2008) is the one that established the modern Bethesda template. The studio bought the Fallout license from Interplay and pivoted the formerly-isometric series into first-person open-world territory. Purists hated it. The general public bought eight million copies. The game's strengths are the explorable Capital Wasteland and the genuinely strange side stories you stumble into. The main plot is, charitably, a structure.

Fallout 4 (2015) is the one with the settlement-building system that the marketing did not really emphasize and that turned out to be where most of the hours went. The voiced protagonist was controversial. The dialogue wheel was controversial. The settlement system was a genuine innovation that other studios are still copying.

Starfield (2023) is the studio's first new IP in twenty-five years and the first major project where the cracks in the formula started to show. A thousand procedurally generated planets is exactly as much fun as it sounds, which is to say it is the second-best version of an idea Bethesda needed to either fully commit to or fully abandon. The Shattered Space DLC and the modding community are slowly making the game what it should have been at launch. Bethesda games are now mostly five-year projects, with the launch being year one.

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🟡 Medium: Feature romance options

Games: Stardew Valley · Persona 5 · Mass Effect 2 · Fire Emblem: Three Houses

The romance system as a game mechanic is a strange piece of design. You are simulating courtship, usually badly, often with a checklist, and the result has to feel like a real relationship while also being scrutable enough that the player can engineer it. Each of these games solves the problem differently.

Stardew Valley (2016) is the cosy version. ConcernedApe shipped it as a one-person project and the romance system is closer to Harvest Moon than to anything else. You bring people specific gifts, they like you more, eventually you can give them a bouquet, eventually you can marry one of them. The bachelors and bachelorettes have actual storylines that play out across hearts, and a couple of them have plot reveals that are genuinely affecting. Sebastian's arc, in particular, is doing more emotional work than it has any right to.

Persona 5 (2017) is the daily-routine version. Atlus's high-school RPG is partly a Tokyo simulator, partly a turn-based dungeon crawler, and partly a dating sim that runs in parallel with both. You can romance several confidants. You can also romance several confidants at the same time, which the game eventually punishes you for in a Valentine's Day scene that has become a meme of its own. The English voice cast is doing committed work.

Mass Effect 2 (2010) is the BioWare version, and the romance system is built directly into the moral architecture of the trilogy. Loyalty missions unlock romance options, and at least one major plot beat in Mass Effect 3 changes depending on who Shepard chose. Garrus, Tali, Thane, Jack. The choices are not equivalent. The fans have spent fifteen years arguing about which is the canonical answer. There is no canonical answer. The game is the answer.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) is the strategy-RPG version. Three school routes, multiple romance options per route, and a tea-time minigame that is essentially a small dating-sim sub-system embedded in a war story. The Edelgard route is the one that breaks the formula and asks you to follow your students into something genuinely terrible. The romance threads carry weight because the whole game is about the moral cost of choosing a side.

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🔵 Hard: Set after a civilization has already ended

Games: Horizon Zero Dawn · Returnal · Death Stranding · Tunic

The post-collapse setting is one of the most overused frames in modern games, and these four manage to do something interesting with it because they treat the collapse itself as the actual subject, not as background.

Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) is set roughly a thousand years after our civilization ended, and the entire main plot is a slow archaeological dig into what actually happened. The reveal is bleaker than the marketing suggested. The robot dinosaurs are a hook. The actual story is about the woman who designed the system that brought life back to a planet she could not save. Ashly Burch's performance as Aloy is the load-bearing element.

Returnal (2021) is Housemarque's roguelike third-person shooter set on a hostile alien planet that may be one large dead civilization or may be a hallucination, depending on how you read it. The combat is the best the studio has ever produced. The story is delivered in fragments, audio logs, and house interiors that should not exist. The ending is genuinely confusing on purpose.

Death Stranding (2019) is Hideo Kojima's first post-Konami game and the most divisive title in this group. America is a network of isolated bunkers connected by trails, the dead are weighing down the living, and the player's job is to deliver packages across a broken landscape. The mechanic of building structures other players can use, and seeing other players' structures appear in your world, is the actual emotional payload. The whole thing is an argument that connection is itself the point.

Tunic (2022) is the cute one that turns out not to be cute. Andrew Shouldice's isometric Zelda-like is set in a world whose previous inhabitants are gone, and the entire game is structured around finding pages of a manual written by that dead culture. Half the puzzles cannot actually be solved without paper and a pencil. The translation puzzles in particular are some of the best designed in the medium. The game ends and you realize you have been doing archaeology the whole time.

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🟣 Tricky: The game manipulates your save file

Spoilers for NieR: Automata, Undertale, OneShot, and Pony Island below. If you have not played these, close this tab and go play Undertale first.

Games: NieR: Automata · OneShot · Undertale · Pony Island

The save file is supposed to be sacred. It is the player's contract with the game: do something, save, the game will remember. These four games break that contract on purpose, and the result is a category of horror and emotional manipulation that no other medium can do.

NieR: Automata (2017) is the one in the opener. The true ending sequence (Ending E) asks you to delete your save data to help another player who is currently stuck on the final boss. The game does not warn you in advance. There is no recovery option. Yoko Taro has been clear: the choice is the meaning. Most players who have finished the game can tell you exactly where they were sitting when they made the call.

Undertale (2015) is the most famous example. Toby Fox built the entire game around the premise that it remembers what you did across multiple playthroughs. Killing every monster on a "genocide run" leaves permanent marks on your save data that persist across new games. Flowey, Sans, and especially Chara know things about you they should not be able to know. The game has been out for ten years and people are still discovering hidden behaviours tied to specific combinations of save manipulation.

OneShot (2014) is the indie-RPG-Maker entry that goes the furthest. The game writes files to your computer outside its own folder, references those files in dialogue, and asks the player to physically move the game window around the desktop to solve puzzles. The fourth wall is not broken so much as never built. The protagonist, Niko, addresses the player directly throughout. The ending requires a decision that has no good answer.

Pony Island (2016) is the horror version. Daniel Mullins's puzzle game presents itself as a corrupted arcade game possessed by a demon, and the demon is aware of you, the player, sitting at your computer. The game writes Steam achievements that lie. It modifies its own files. It produces a fake error dialog that you have to interact with as part of a puzzle. Mullins later made Inscryption, which extends the same approach. Pony Island is shorter and meaner. It is also very funny.

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The four save-manipulation games form a small, slightly cursed sub-genre that almost no major studio is willing to touch, because reaching outside the game world breaks every assumption about what a game is allowed to do. The fact that all four work is the entire reason the trick is worth doing.

If you also play CineLinkr, today's puzzle is over at cinelinkr.com/puzzle/2026-05-17.