PixelLinkr #121: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Devil May Cry 3 does not treat the credits as a rest. Dante keeps fighting demons while names roll, and the game counts the bodies. Even the acknowledgements section has performance targets.
🟢 Easy: Released in 2025
Games: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 · Split Fiction · Avowed · South of Midnight
Four 2025 releases, with almost no agreement about what a year in games should look like. Clair Obscur builds turn-based combat around timed inputs. Split Fiction keeps two players moving through science-fiction and fantasy stories. Avowed returns to the world of Eora, while South of Midnight heads into a Southern Gothic folktale.
Three use Unreal Engine 5. That technical overlap is less interesting than the range: a doomed expedition, co-op writers, first-person fantasy, and a stop-motion-inspired action adventure all fit inside the same calendar.
🟡 Medium: Weapon-based fighting games
Games: SoulCalibur II · Guilty Gear: Strive · Nidhogg · Blade Strangers
SoulCalibur II made its console versions famous by giving each platform a different guest fighter. GameCube got Link, PlayStation 2 got Heihachi, and Xbox got Spawn. One of those guests arrived without a sword and presumably hoped nobody would mention it.
Nidhogg reduces the weapon fighter to a tense fencing line and a race toward the edge. Guilty Gear: Strive and Blade Strangers pile on larger casts and louder effects, but spacing still begins at the dangerous end of a weapon.
🔵 Hard: A mobile base travels with the player
Games: Genesis Alpha One · Windforge · Volcanoids · Zompiercer
The base is usually where a survival game sends you after an expedition. These games bring it along. Genesis Alpha One turns an expanding starship into home, factory, and colony project. Windforge asks players to build an airship, then trusts the construction enough to let it fly.
Volcanoids uses a drillship that can retreat underground before eruptions. Zompiercer puts the workshop on a train rolling through a zombie outbreak.
This group earns its hard label because the vehicles look unrelated. Once the ship, drill, and rails become rooms rather than rides, the connection locks into place. Home is where the crafting bench currently happens to be.
🟣 Tricky: Playable action continues during the credits
Games: Super Smash Bros. Brawl · Rayman Legends · Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening · Viewtiful Joe
Credits normally mean the controller can go down. These four regard that as a dangerous assumption. Brawl turns names into targets. Rayman Legends keeps the characters moving. Devil May Cry 3 runs a demon challenge, and Viewtiful Joe keeps its movie-star energy alive through the roll.
The pattern arrives late by design. The shared mechanic lives after the point most players mentally mark as "finished." Remembering it means remembering that one last input when everybody else was reading middleware companies.
There is also a small act of gratitude hidden in the chaos: you are looking directly at the people who made the game while trying to shoot or punch around their names. Respectful? Debatable. Memorable? Absolutely.
The moving-base group wins because every vehicle becomes a floor plan. Today's CineLinkr puzzle has a less reliable escape route: four couples discovering that isolation leaves nowhere to hide from the conversation.