PixelLinkr #74: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Today's board had a nice little personality split: first it hands you toys, then dreams, then a pile of stylish violence, then a full-on community workshop where the walls are on fire. Honestly, that is a pretty fair summary of the modern games industry if you squint hard enough and do not ask anyone to explain the business model.

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🟢 Easy: Toys-to-life games

Games: Disney Infinity · Lego Dimensions · Starlink: Battle for Atlas · Skylanders: Giants

This one is the category equivalent of spotting a toy shelf and immediately hearing your wallet scream. Plastic figures, portals, bases, modular ship bits, all of it had the same basic promise: put the thing on the thing and the game will get a little louder about it. Skylanders was the loudest of the bunch in spirit, since it basically helped define the toys-to-life boom, while Starlink took the whole idea and said, sure, let's bolt physical ship parts onto the controller mount and see who blinks first.

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🟡 Medium: Dream worlds shape the play

Games: Psychonauts 2 · Alice: Madness Returns · Among the Sleep · Little Nemo: The Dream Master

Dream logic is such a handy excuse for designers. Need a weird level? Call it a nightmare. Need a sad one? Call it a memory. Need something that feels like a child's brain has been left alone with a box of crayons and a locked door? Congratulations, you have a dream world. Psychonauts 2 is the poster child here, since it literally builds levels inside minds, while Little Nemo shoves Nemo through Slumberland and Nightmare Land like the game itself is being chased by a bedtime story with unresolved issues.

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🔵 Hard: Stylish character-action games

Games: Devil May Cry · Ninja Gaiden Black · Bayonetta 2 · Astral Chain

This category is pure swagger. If you are not dodging at the exact right second while flinging a demon into the air and looking annoyingly cool about it, the games in this lane will notice. Devil May Cry gets bonus points for starting life inside a Resident Evil project before wandering off and becoming its own very dramatic problem. Bayonetta 2 also shows up here with the added weirdness of being published by Nintendo, which still feels like someone let the elegant chaos department use the good scissors.

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🟣 Tricky: Player-created levels drive the appeal

Games: LittleBigPlanet 2 · Super Mario Maker 2 · TrackMania Nations Forever · Geometry Dash

This is where the players stop being players for a minute and become the unpaid, wildly talented level design department. The whole appeal is that somebody else made the nonsense, and now you get to suffer through it for fun. Super Mario Maker 2 gave Switch players a full Mario course editor, which is exactly the sort of feature that leads to genius, nonsense, and six thousand levels named something like "hard but fair pls try." Geometry Dash has an enormous user-made library too, which feels less like a game feature and more like a long-running dare.

If you want the movie cousin of this whole mood, CineLinkr is right there with rom-com personas, musicals, deadly trials, and those glorious past participle titles that sound like they were named by a committee on three hours of sleep.