PixelLinkr #219: The Story Behind the Puzzle

The Amiga manual for Pinball Fantasies assigns the flippers to the left and right Shift keys, with Space to tilt the table. Two small decisions and one helpfully enormous key for a bad one. A remarkably efficient control scheme for making a person panic.

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🟢 Easy: Flippers keep a pinball in play

Games: Devil's Crush · Alien Crush · Pinball Fantasies · Pinball FX3

Devil's Crush puts three pairs of flippers into an occult-themed table. The imagery is menacing, but your immediate problem is still a ball heading somewhere inconvenient.

Pinball Fantasies offers four tables, including Partyland and Stones 'n' Bones. Its original Amiga manual makes the physical controls especially clear. Alien Crush and Pinball FX3 round out a genre row where the table dressing changes much more than your central job.

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🟡 Medium: Inventory objects solve environmental puzzles

Games: The Secret of Monkey Island · Day of the Tentacle · Deponia · Broken Age

These are pockets full of possible answers. Collect something strange, keep it, and eventually work out which equally strange situation it belongs in. Deponia explicitly builds puzzles around picking up objects and combining inventory items.

Broken Age gives its two protagonists separate inventories and lets objects interact with context-sensitive parts of the scene. Its first act arrived in 2014, with the second following in 2015. Across these different releases, the familiar pleasure is turning an apparently useless possession into the exact thing that lets you move on.

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🔵 Hard: Move unconscious guards out of sight

Games: Dishonored 2 · Hitman: Blood Money · Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory · Thief II: The Metal Age

Knocking somebody out can solve one stealth problem and immediately create another. The unconscious person is still evidence, and a patrol may be about to walk past it.

The Blood Money mission Flatline offers a practical example: sedate a policeman, take the disguise and drag him to a dumpster. Chaos Theory lets a sleeper choke lead into a fireman's carry. The methods differ, but the destination is somewhere other people won't look.

Dishonored 2 also lets bodies be carried and concealed. Thief II slows Garrett while he carries someone and prevents him from wielding a weapon. The answer is that extra act of relocation, not just four games in which staying unseen is generally advisable.

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🟣 Tricky: Developed by Creative Assembly

Games: Alien: Isolation · Rome: Total War · Total War: Warhammer II · Halo Wars 2

Alien: Isolation is the awkward-looking relative until the developer credit clicks. Creative Assembly connects its survival horror with the strategy games, despite the enormous difference in how much control you seem to have over a bad situation.

Halo Wars 2 is a co-development credit with 343 Industries. That qualification belongs in the explanation: the connection doesn't require Creative Assembly to have worked alone.

Nor is this a publisher group. Rome: Total War originally came from Activision, while Warhammer II and Alien: Isolation came from Sega, and Halo Wars 2 from Microsoft. Following the developer rather than the box's publishing label is what brings the outlier back into place.

There is something pleasing about a board that begins with two flippers and ends with a studio capable of giving you entire armies. Today's CineLinkr has characters who can hear other people's thoughts, which would be a deeply unfair advantage for a security guard.