Oh, I do love me some Tetris Effect: Connected. I’ve played it fairly regularly since it first came out on PS4, before it was Connected, and I’ve enjoyed it on PC and Xbox, too. I even braved using the old PSVR headset to enjoy it at its fullest, which is not something I’d do today, given my general distaste for virtual reality.
Lumines Arise is the next game from the people who made Tetris Effect. Given the pedigree of this particular team, which is overseen by a true industry icon, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, I was eager to have a look at Lumines Arise and see how the game has evolved.
What is Lumines Arise?
The latest game in this long-running puzzle series is called Lumines Arise, and the “Arise” part of the title refers to the new central mechanic, which I’ll get to in due course.
I’ve played a lot of Lumines Remastered, and nearly all of that game has made it over into this one. And then some.
The essence of both titles is the block-busting gameplay. The games are played with blocks that are made up of four smaller squares, which are limited to two different colours.
These 2×2 blocks drop one at a time, and you can twist and turn them, and then arrange them across a wide playing space, placing them efficiently and trying to make connections before you inevitably run out of time and space.
Imagine horizontal Tetris, but with the same square each time.
Each of the four sections of the squares is different, and you must arrange them as best you can to make even bigger squares of the same colour.
The more squares and the bigger they are, the better, but you don’t have much time because every few seconds, there’s a wipe that sweeps across from left to right, removing any completed squares in play.
It’s more nuanced than that, but essentially, you’ve got to make big squares to score big points.
What’s the Arise bit, then?
The new Arise mechanic is fairly similar to the eponymous Effect mechanic in Tetris Effect, in the sense that both pause the normal gameplay and enter you into a secondary state where your actions have a different impact on the tiles in play.
In Lumines Arise, when a meter fills up to 100%, you can enter the Arise mode. You then have a limited number of wipes to make the biggest square possible. The first square you make when initiating this mode becomes the target of the whole phase, and as you make that shape one bigger, squares of the opposite colour are removed from around it. This allows you to make one big, fat square that scores you loads of points.
Like Effect, Arise has a Journey mode. This is the main focus of the game, and like Tetris Effect, it encourages you to push for bigger scores across a campaign that is broken up into smaller segments. Each one has four or five stages, and while you can keep playing if you bust, your score resets.
What else makes Lumines Arise good?
I can’t claim to have played in VR mode, but I can imagine how good it is based on my previous experience with Tetris Effect and Rez Infinite.
Even on a boring old flat screen, I absolutely adored the audio-visual experience on offer in Arise, and as someone with unusual vision, I love how entwined the audio and visuals are with each other. It’s one of the most glorious-looking games these old eyes have ever seen, with smooth animations, vivid colours, and eye-melting scenes that evolve as you play. Enhance’s work on synesthesia shines again.
There is also quite a lot of game here. Not only are there three difficulty settings for the main campaign, but there are tutorials and challenges to work through, plus multiplayer modes.
In fact, I sat down earlier today and tried the PvP mode with my son, and with a handicap applied, it was a really fun and competitive experience. It works exactly how you think it does: the squares you remove on your side build up points which fill up your opponent’s side, until one of you runs out of space and it’s game over.
I’ve already sunk a bunch of hours into the Journey mode, tried a bunch of challenges, and enjoyed a bit of multiplayer, and after all that, I’m positive I’ll be coming back again for more in the future. Lumines Arise isn’t quite as good as Tetris Effect – very few video games are – but it comes close enough to make it an essential experience if you love Tetris Effect, Lumines, or puzzle games in general.
Lumines Arise is out now on PC (Win)andPS5. I played the game on PS5 via access kindly provided by the game’s publisher, Enhance.
