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Video Games · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every Video Games puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Video Game #1 A major character is killed at a fixed point in the story, and for well over two decades players have traded rumours about a secret sequence of actions that prevents it. There is no such sequence.
- Video Game #2 You cannot permanently die, and that is the premise rather than a convenience - you wake up on a mortuary slab with no memory and a body covered in scars that turn out to be messages you left for yourself.
- Video Game #3 A narrator describes what you are about to do, and the whole game is about whether you actually do it. Disobey and he adapts, then sulks, then starts constructing rooms specifically designed to punish you.
- Video Game #1 Within weeks of release, Intel, Lotus and Carnegie Mellon University had all banned it from their internal networks - not over its content, but because its multiplayer mode was flooding office systems with traffic.
- Video Game #2 It made darkness into a resource. A gem on your interface shows how visible you currently are, and light and sound are the two things you spend the entire game managing.
- Video Game #3 It is a database and nothing else. You type words into a police search box and watch whatever comes back, assembling a case out of fragments delivered in no particular order.
- Video Game #1 Its fighters were digitised from photographs of real actors in costume, shot against a blue screen - and the differently coloured ninjas are all the same performer in recoloured outfits.
- Video Game #2 You piece together what happened aboard the ship almost entirely from audio logs recorded by people who are already dead - a technique it did not invent, but did turn into a standard.
- Video Game #3 You come back to an empty family house and simply read it - notes stuck to the fridge, a mixtape, a diary - and there is no threat, no enemy, and nothing at all you can fail.
- Video Game #1 Its combo system was an accident. Programmers noticed certain moves left an opponent unable to recover in time, judged the timing far too tight for anyone to exploit deliberately, and left it in.
- Video Game #2 It is generally credited as the first commercial game to ship with cel-shading - a technique that renders three-dimensional models with hard ink outlines so they look hand-drawn.
- Video Game #3 You cannot jump. The only thing you can do is reverse gravity, so the ceiling becomes the floor, and the entire game is constructed around that single verb.
- Video Game #1 The camera is operated by a character who follows you around filming everything - an in-fiction excuse invented because nobody had solved three-dimensional cameras yet and the team wanted players to forgive it.
- Video Game #2 You play a photojournalist, and the core loop is sneaking into places you should not be, photographing evidence of what is happening there, and selling the pictures to an underground newspaper.
- Video Game #3 Every cave is generated fresh, and every object obeys exactly the same rules as every other - so a shopkeeper you anger will hunt you for the rest of the run, and a bomb will kill him, a boulder, or you.
- Video Game #1 Its source code was stolen and leaked online roughly a year before release by a hacker in Germany, delaying the entire project - and the developer eventually tried to lure him abroad with a fake job interview.
- Video Game #2 It is structured around a school timetable. You attend lessons, which are minigames that hand you genuinely useful abilities, or you skip them and get chased across the grounds by prefects.
- Video Game #3 One man spent roughly five years building every part of it - the code, every sprite, the music, the script - in his spare time after work, and then simply gave it away.
- Video Game #1 Its designer has said the shape came to him from a pizza with one slice removed, and the four pursuers each run a different routine - one chases directly, one tries to cut you off, one is deliberately erratic.
- Video Game #2 Its central mechanic is holding a girl's hand. You lead her through a castle, and the controller pulses gently in time with her grip so you can feel that she is still there.
- Video Game #3 You are a man sitting in a cauldron holding a sledgehammer, and the hammer is the only thing you control. One slip can undo an hour of progress in about three seconds, and there are no checkpoints of any kind.
- Video Game #1 It contains a sequence in which you can accomplish nothing whatsoever - you crawl, dying, away from a wreck while everything burns around you, and then it simply ends, and it does not let you win.
- Video Game #2 It is built almost wholly in first person, including the tucking, rolling and ledge-grabbing, and its city is painted overwhelmingly white with red used sparingly to show you where to go next.
- Video Game #3 Time only moves when you do. Stand perfectly still and bullets hang motionless in the air; take one step sideways and the entire room lurches into motion around you.
- Video Game #1 It was designed to be legible to somebody who had never held a controller in their life, which is why the tennis swing is simply a swing - and why a great many grandparents ended up with sore shoulders.
- Video Game #2 Every level is the inside of somebody's head, so the art direction restarts from scratch each time - a black velvet painting, a suburb rendered as a conspiracy corkboard, a city of tiny fish where you are the rampaging monster.
- Video Game #3 The rules of each level are written out on the playing field as blocks you can push around, so you do not really solve the puzzle - you rewrite the laws of physics until the puzzle solves itself.
- Video Game #1 The character was coloured to match his publisher's logo, and his red shoes were reportedly drawn from a combination of Michael Jackson's boots and Father Christmas.
- Video Game #2 Its levels were built so that nearly every objective has at least three solutions - a vent, a hacked terminal, a conversation - and playtesters kept discovering a fourth that the designers had not planned for.
- Video Game #3 You die in a single hit, and so does everyone else, which turns every floor into a puzzle you solve by memorising it through repeated failure - and the restart is deliberately close to instantaneous.
- Video Game #1 A damaging effect meant to stay inside one boss encounter escaped into a capital city, spread through crowds of low-level players and killed thousands of them - and epidemiologists later studied the incident as a model for real outbreaks.
- Video Game #2 Its team was assembled deliberately as a supergroup: the creators of two rival role-playing franchises, plus the artist behind a hugely popular martial-arts manga, working on one project together.
- Video Game #3 Two developers quit their jobs in Shanghai to build it, and their crowdfunding campaign asked for ten thousand dollars - it finished more than two thousand percent over target.
- Video Game #1 A fragment of unfinished code left sitting on one stretch of coastline became the most famous glitch in the medium, and taught an entire generation of schoolchildren how to duplicate rare items.
- Video Game #2 Its monsters are not random. Each one is a manifestation of a single man's guilt, and the game quietly grades you on things you never knew it was watching - how often you study a photograph, whether you keep your health topped up.
- Video Game #3 The entire solar system runs on a twenty-two minute timer, and you keep nothing at all when it resets - no items, no upgrades, no unlocks. The only thing that carries over is what is inside your own head.
- Video Game #1 It is the only entry in its series that lets you switch between three playable criminals mid-mission, with the camera dropping out of the sky to find whichever one you picked, usually doing something appalling.
- Video Game #2 You paint on the screen to change the world - slash a line to cut something, draw a circle in the sky to bring back the sun - over an art style built to look like ink on woodblock-printed paper.
- Video Game #3 It is drawn entirely in dithered one-bit black and white, a restriction its creator chose partly because it let a single person build a large and detailed world without an art team.
- Video Game #1 Its targeting system was worked out by studying samurai films - specifically how a swordsman keeps an opponent framed in view while circling him - and that one idea solved 3D combat for the next two decades.
- Video Game #2 Its director hired actors and recorded dialogue in a proper studio at a time when almost everything else used text boxes, and storyboarded the whole production like a film.
- Video Game #3 Its designer funded it out of his own savings over several years, then paid an artist to repaint every frame by hand after deciding his own programmer art was holding the whole thing back.
- Video Game #1 The clouds and the bushes are the same sprite in two different colours, a trick used to save cartridge space. The entire thing - every level, every sound, every enemy - had to fit inside about 40 kilobytes.
- Video Game #2 There are no ordinary enemies in it at all. No small monsters, no dungeons, no towns, no shops - only sixteen fights, and a very long, very quiet horse ride between each one.
- Video Game #3 Its designer had worked on a big-budget adventure series before quitting to build something alone, in which the entire verb set is: look at document, compare against rulebook, stamp.