I bloody love Tetris. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the game here on Rogueliker and it won’t be the last, I would wager. The elegant simplicity of the setup and the gentle sort, stack, and filter of the gameplay loop has kept me coming back since childhood.
And so, when Tetris Forever dropped in my inbox and I was offered the chance to play this collection of games for review, I cleared my throat and put my hand up, despite the lack of overall roguishness.
What is Tetris Forever?
This collection of Tetris games has been collected together by Digital Eclipse. The studio has drawn together a number of historically significant Tetris and Tetris-adjacent games, restored them, and then added its own for good measure.
There are 18 games in the collection, but I think that’s a rather misleading number. On the one hand, many of these games are just variations of Tetris, pure and simple.
Playing an accurate recreation of the first version of Tetris as it was on the old Electronika 60 is interesting, as you get to see how the first iteration of the game played (it’s reassuringly similar, although you get points for being quick rather than for completing lines).
The earlier iterations sit alongside an entirely new variation of Tetris, and in that journey we can see how the gameplay has evolved over the years. When viewed together as a whole, you can see how mechanics and quality of life features have been layered in over time. Yet, they’re also the same game at heart.
It helps that there is also a selection of Tetris spin-offs such as Hatris (where you stack hats) and Super Bombliss (where you trigger explosions). There are multiple variations of these games, often with these curios bundled up with alternative variations of standard Tetris. Then, when you dig in further, there are often multiple game modes within each game, and so the number of potential ways to play goes back up again.
I’ll put it another way. There is a lot of Tetris in Forever, including an array of games (such as Tetris Battle Gaiden) that never got a commercial release here in the UK, to my knowledge. There’s so much history here, if you want it.
Tetris Warp
The new game in the collection borrows from all of the other titles in the bundle by injecting little sections of retro gameplay into the action of a more modern brand of Tetris.
There are certain tetraminos in play that, when cleared, whisk you away in the titular “warp” to a different version of Tetris. In this short section of ye olde gameplay you’re given a quickfire objective, such as clear four lines or a quick double, and if you can do that in time you get more points when you return back to the main game.
There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, other than a couple of different modes to play. If you like it though, you’ve got leaderboards ready to go, and if you really like it you can improve your skills by going back and practicing the older versions of Tetris in the collection.
For what it’s worth, I quite liked the different variations of this new mode, although I sometimes found it a little discombobulating to be pulled from one game to another. The immediacy of needing to complete a specific objective before flicking back to a more standard rhythm of building for combos gave Tetris Warp a truly unique feel.
What else is in the collection?
Not only does Tetris Forever include a broad and welcome selection of games, it also delivers a slice of Tetris history. There is a really interesting interactive collection to work through that explains the history of the game and gives a lot of information about its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, and the other people involved in its success.
If you’re a big Tetris fan then you’ll surely find this interactive history tour quite interesting. It sits alongside a genuinely interesting array of Tetris games, each compelling in their own way; viewed together they go so far as to chart the evolution of a truly iconic game. To an extent, at least – there are so many more versions of Tetris that aren’t included in this collection (for various reasons), and of course it would be nice to have more different editions of the game to play.
Tetris Forever delivers a huge dose of nostalgia, especially for those of us who played a few of these archaic versions of the game back in their heyday. It’s great to see how it has evolved over the years. Now that I’ve played through the whole collection, I want to go back to some of the other versions of the game and continue this journey down memory lane…
Tetris Forever is out on November 12 on PC, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox. I played the game on PC via access provided by the publisher and their friends in PR (thanks).
