PixelLinkr #137: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Carrion makes the creature in the containment facility the playable character. The humans have doors, alarms, and the firm belief that this is still their laboratory. The creature has appetite. Management will be hearing about the outcome, briefly.

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🟢 Easy: Play as a consuming nonhuman organism

Games: Mushroom 11 · Tasty Planet · Carrion · The Visitor

Mushroom 11 gives you fungus. Tasty Planet gives you goo. Carrion supplies flesh, while The Visitor hands over an alien creature. None of them grows through a seminar or a tasteful upgrade tree. They consume whatever fits, become larger, and reconsider the definition of "whatever fits."

Once one member falls into place, the connection reads quickly. Eating drives movement and progression rather than filling a health bar on the side. The menu has one special today: the level.

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🟡 Medium: Guide a crowd toward safety

Games: Humanity · Lemmings Revolution · Swarm · The Last Guy

Humanity, released in 2023, turns a mass of people into a routing problem. Lemmings Revolution was already making that premise stressful in 2000. Swarm and The Last Guy vary the bodies and hazards, but the basic burden remains: a crowd will keep moving, and you had better make the route survivable.

These games make scale funny until the first avoidable casualty. One tiny figure is a character. A hundred become geometry. Then the game asks you to care about every dot in the geometry, which is frankly an unreasonable amount of responsibility to place on a cursor.

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🔵 Hard: Based on tabletop RPG systems outside Dungeons & Dragons

Games: Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood · Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines · Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader · Shadowrun Returns

The hard group rewards ignoring the obvious label. Yes, these are role-playing games. The sharper connection is that each draws from a tabletop system that is not Dungeons & Dragons.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines come from White Wolf lines. Bloodlines carries the Vampire: The Masquerade setting and its rules lineage directly in the title. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader reaches back to tabletop science fiction, while Shadowrun Returns brings its own mix of fantasy and technology from the table to the screen.

Four different rulebooks are hiding behind familiar video game furniture. Character sheets became menus. Dice became calculations. Arguments about the rules simply moved online, where they could become much longer.

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🟣 Tricky: The player performs for an audience

Games: Puppeteer · Foul Play · Once Upon a Jester · Trombone Champ

Puppeteer commits to its stage framing so thoroughly that the audience reacts audibly to what the player does. Foul Play treats combat as stage fighting. Once Upon a Jester builds around improvised shows, and Trombone Champ turns musical performance into a public record of your lungs betraying you.

The crowd is the tell. At first, puppet scenery and theatrical costumes can look like four unrelated art choices. Then the applause, reactions, and concert framing line up. The character's performance and the player's performance become the same public spectacle.

Trombone Champ is the ideal final card because it understands a hard truth about rhythm games: confidence often arrives several notes before competence. The audience still gets a show. Nobody promised them the right one.

I expected the carnivorous blob to own this puzzle, but the audible crowd won. Nothing sharpens a mistake like witnesses.

Over at CineLinkr, the same day's puzzle also puts performers under scrutiny, though its stage magicians have chosen deception instead of trombone technique.