PixelLinkr #164: 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.
Super Time Force turns failed attempts into coworkers. Rewind, try again, and your previous run keeps fighting beside you, an efficient system for making your mistakes feel briefly employed.
🟢 Easy: Sequels introduce a new main protagonist
Games: Prototype 2 · Mafia II · Life Is Strange 2 · Outlast II
James Heller replaces Alex Mercer in Prototype 2, and Vito Scaletta takes over from Tommy Angelo in Mafia II. Both sequels keep the world while changing whose problems the player inherits.
Life Is Strange 2 follows Sean Diaz instead of Max Caulfield. Outlast II hands the camera to Blake Langermann, which remains a terrible job with unusually high battery expenses.
🟡 Medium: Playable royalty
Games: Princess Peach: Showtime! · Final Fantasy XV · Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom · The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Peach and Zelda finally occupy the lead slot, while Noctis begins Final Fantasy XV as a crown prince on the least relaxing road trip in royal history. Evan in Ni no Kuni II starts as a deposed boy king and has to build another kingdom.
The group is less about tiaras than responsibility. Everybody can issue decrees. Everybody still has to do the platforming personally.
🔵 Hard: Rewind time to revise recent actions
Games: Iron Danger · Super Time Force · Timelie · Shadwen
These games put a scrubber on failure. Iron Danger and Timelie let players inspect a timeline, while Shadwen rewinds stealth errors before the guards can make them permanent.
Super Time Force goes further by preserving earlier attempts as active copies. A bad run can become useful if it fired in roughly the correct direction.
The connection is about revision, not a time-loop plot. Players edit recent actions directly, turning execution into something closer to video editing with more gunfire.
🟣 Tricky: Built with RenderWare
Games: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City · Sonic Heroes · Puyo Pop Fever · Black
RenderWare sits underneath an open-world crime game, a 3D platformer, a falling-block puzzle, and a loud first-person shooter. The software has range. It also has no respect for genre boundaries.
Criterion developed the middleware before Burnout made the studio famous for crashes. RenderWare became one of the quiet workhorses of the PlayStation 2 era.
That is the aha: nothing on the screen supplies the answer. The common thread lives under the hood, where Vice City and Puyo Puyo can share technology without ever having to explain themselves.
RenderWare is the day's strangest connection. CineLinkr answers with another unlikely shared space: four films whose titles point to Los Angeles County.