PixelLinkr #209: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Ridiculous Fishing asks you to reel fish out of the ocean and then shoot them in midair for money. The rod gets dinner out of the water; the shotgun makes sure nobody eats it. I appreciate that the title warned us.

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🟢 Easy: Catch fish as the main activity

Games: Sega Bass Fishing · Sega Marine Fishing · Rapala Pro Fishing · Ridiculous Fishing

Sega Bass Fishing turns the patient business of waiting for a bite into an arcade deadline. You need to land enough weight before the timer runs out. Even sitting by the water becomes a performance review. Its original Japanese arcade release was in 1997, before the Dreamcast version that many players remember.

Sega Marine Fishing takes the lure-and-reel routine into salt water, then gives you item cards to build an aquarium and acquire equipment. It is a pleasingly circular reward: catch fish so that you can look at more fish. Rapala Pro Fishing takes your choice of tackle seriously enough to have a fishing buddy suggest a different lure colour. The advice can matter even when you think you picked the right kind of lure.

And then Ridiculous Fishing tips the whole boat over. You avoid fish while the hook sinks, collect them on the way back up, and shoot the catch above the surface. Catching fish is still the main activity in all four. One of them just has an unusually aggressive accounting department.

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🟡 Medium: Drive passengers to their destinations

Games: Crazy Taxi 2 · OMSI 2 · Bus Simulator 18 · Motor Town: Behind the Wheel

Crazy Taxi 2 added multiple-passenger fares and a jump called the Crazy Hop. Someone looked at a taxi and decided that its biggest design flaw was staying on the ground. You still have to deliver people to their destinations; you simply have a more exciting relationship with the road on the way there.

OMSI 2 has a different idea of excitement. It recreates bus routes in Berlin's Spandau district and changes across the years 1986 to 1994. Its manual walks you through opening the front doors for boarding and responding to stop requests so passengers can leave through the rear. Bus Simulator 18 also wants people delivered safely and punctually. The common job survives a dramatic change in acceptable workplace behaviour.

Motor Town: Behind the Wheel includes taxi fares, bus routes and hitchhikers alongside cargo work. Its 2021 date is the Early Access release, not a claim that development was finished that year. Passenger transport is one substantial part of its driving sandbox. Put it beside Crazy Taxi 2 and the connection is the people in the vehicle, rather than how politely you treat the corners.

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🔵 Hard: Timed inputs improve reloading or weapon cooling

Games: Gears of War 2 · Alien Swarm · Star Wars Battlefront · Synthetik: Legion Rising

Gears of War 2 makes reloading another chance to get something wrong under pressure. Start the reload, watch the moving bar, and press again in the marked zone to finish faster. Its perfect-reload window can shrink after repeated successes on weapons such as the Longshot. The reward for good timing is a smaller target for your next button press.

Alien Swarm also rewards a second press during the highlighted window. A successful fast reload cuts the wait to roughly a third; missing it makes the marine fumble. Higher difficulties shrink the window. That is a lot of attention to demand while an alien is trying to become your immediate neighbour.

The 2015 Star Wars Battlefront uses overheating blasters instead of conventional ammunition. Hitting its active-reload timing cools the weapon faster. Synthetik: Legion Rising normally adds manual magazine ejection before you begin reloading, then lets a well-timed confirmation finish the remaining wait and award a bonus. Discarding a magazine with ammunition left in it also discards those rounds.

The useful detail is the second decision. These games let you wait out weapon recovery, but give you a short timing challenge that can improve it. Knowing that a game has guns would not solve this row. Remembering what your fingers do between volleys might.

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🟣 Tricky: Protagonists wake with amnesia

Games: Planescape: Torment · Amnesia: The Dark Descent · Disco Elysium · Sanitarium

The Nameless One wakes in a mortuary in Planescape: Torment, with instructions tattooed on his back. Morte can read them to him. I have forgotten a password before, but I have never needed a floating skull to consult my torso for account recovery.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent opens with Daniel waking in Brennenburg Castle with little memory of his past. Disco Elysium puts its detective in a trashed hostel room without a usable sense of who he is. The settings pull in very different directions, but both make an ordinary introductory question unexpectedly difficult: who, exactly, are we playing?

Sanitarium's bandaged protagonist wakes in an asylum after a car crash, unable to remember his identity or how he arrived. Its opening has a different kind of disorientation from the detective's wrecked room or the Nameless One's mortuary. There is no need to spoil the later explanations to see the shared starting point.

That is the click in this row: four stories begin with waking up, then with the discovery that a personal history is missing. The answer is in the opening situation, not the genre. A fantasy RPG can share it with a horror game even when almost everything else about playing them feels different.

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I trust the fishing buddy to remember which lure I brought. I am less confident about anyone in the last row remembering why we came to the lake.

For another uncomfortable relationship with memory, CineLinkr's September 30 puzzle includes characters who cannot retain new memories, rather than these games' missing pasts.