PixelLinkr #57: The Story Behind the Puzzle

The Last Express came out in 1997, sold almost no copies, and has been called one of the greatest adventure games ever made often enough that it might actually be true. Jordan Mechner set a real-time murder mystery on the Orient Express in 1914 and built every passenger their own schedule that ran whether or not the player was watching. Today's board starts there, then moves through deckbuilder runs, settlement pressure, and a closing group of titles that each sound like they are telling you what to do.

---

🟢 Easy: Classic point-and-click adventures

Games: Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars · Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge · Thimbleweed Park · The Last Express

Broken Sword is Templar conspiracy tourism, affectionately rendered. George Stobbart witnesses a clown assassination in a Paris café and spends the rest of the game pulling at a thread that leads through Knights Templar history, Syria, and Ireland. The hand-drawn backgrounds still hold up and the puzzles are fair enough that most players feel clever rather than stuck.

Monkey Island 2 is the SCUMM era at something close to its peak. Guybrush Threepwood is chasing the treasure of Big Whoop, LeChuck is chasing Guybrush, and the game takes every opportunity to be strange and funny and then suddenly ominous. Thimbleweed Park is Ron Gilbert returning to those exact design instincts decades later, with a 1987 murder mystery and a town full of characters who seem to have been waiting for exactly this kind of interruption.

---

🟡 Medium: Deckbuilders with combat runs

Games: Across the Obelisk · Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles · Balatro · Vault of the Void

Balatro looks like the odd one out because it is built around poker hands rather than the collectible card framework most players recognize. But the run structure is the same: you build a deck, or a hand-modifier system that functions like one, fight your way through escalating encounters, and find out on the final boss whether the build was actually good or just looked good in the middle rooms.

Astrea replaces cards with dice, which changes the texture of the decisions without changing the underlying combat-run logic. Across the Obelisk and Vault of the Void are more traditional, both offering that familiar pleasure of drawing a card you put in the deck four rooms ago and watching it do exactly what you needed it to do. The group is about the run-and-build rhythm. The specific implementation is just the flavor.

---

🔵 Hard: Colony builders that keep the pressure on

Games: Clanfolk · Kingdoms and Castles · Patron · Songs of Syx

Songs of Syx operates at a scale most colony builders avoid. The game expects thousands of people and the infrastructure to support them, and the pressure comes from managing something closer to a civilization than a village. Clanfolk is smaller and more personal. You manage a Scottish clan through seasons, and the colony stays intimate long enough that losing a character feels like an actual loss rather than a resource deduction.

Kingdoms and Castles leans into approachability, with a clean interface and a difficulty slope that gives players room to figure things out. Patron is between them: a city builder with a social tier system that adds political pressure on top of the usual supply chains and housing counts. All four share the logic that the settlement is never finished and the next problem is already forming somewhere in the numbers.

---

🟣 Tricky: One-word titles that feel like action words

Games: Bastion · Control · Inside · Prey

These four games have almost nothing in common as experiences. Bastion is an isometric action RPG with a narrator who describes everything the player does as they do it. Control is a third-person shooter in a brutalist government building that reorganizes itself. Inside is a wordless dystopian platformer. Prey is an immersive sim on a space station where the mimics can become a coffee cup.

The connection is purely in the titles. Each word reads as a state or a command before you know what the game is about. Once the pattern is visible, the category clicks. Before that, the four titles sit there looking like four games that happened to get named by the same minimalist instinct, which is exactly the trap the tricky slot is meant to set.

The Last Express is the entry I keep coming back to. Building a real-time schedule for every character on a train arriving in Constantinople in 77 hours is an extraordinary design commitment, and the game rewards attention in a way that most modern titles are too nervous to ask for. Today's CineLinkr puzzle opens with trains, moves through capers and borrowed identities, and ends with four movie titles that work exactly the same way these do.