anyone else regularly rewatch the Tetris Effect announcement trailer and get just a little too emotional about it? no? just me?
https://youtu.be/Mr8fVT_Ds4Q
https://youtu.be/Mr8fVT_Ds4Q
This 5-star review is not earned entirely off the merits of this specific game. Rather, I consider Tetris Effect to be the definitively best version of modern Tetris, and Tetris itself is a perfect game.
Tetris Effect especially understands Tetris as a meditative experience. It enhances that meditation through gorgeous music that reacts to your placement of pieces, and ephemeral relaxing visuals.
Tetris changed my life, really. Tetris is a patient companion for when the mind is too chaotic. Tetris is beautiful.
Tetris Effect especially understands Tetris as a meditative experience. It enhances that meditation through gorgeous music that reacts to your placement of pieces, and ephemeral relaxing visuals.
Tetris changed my life, really. Tetris is a patient companion for when the mind is too chaotic. Tetris is beautiful.
What's that old saying? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Very little about the fundamental gameplay of Tetris has altered since 1984, which is a testament to the simple genius of its concept. Tetris Effect simply builds upon what Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov created almost forty years ago. Suitably named after the phenomenon in which players would find its puzzles impacting their thoughts and dreams, Effect bolsters the game with a phantasmagoria of hypnotic images, sounds and sensations. Oh, and it's really challenging. Like, I mean, really fucking challenging.
This isn't just Tetris, this is Tetsuya Mizugishi's Tetris, and if you know, you know. Fans of his previous work have undoubtedly already played this and loved it; if you didn't love his previous work, this won't change your mind; but if you loved this game, and have never played another of Tetsuya Mizugishi's games, then, please, add them to your backlog.
There are two feelings when you play Tetris Effect. One is the laser focused mastery of the genuinely difficult, satisfying Tetris challenge. The other is going from vibing with the aestethic to absolutely ascending to it. It's when both of these feelings connect with one another that this truly becomes an "Experience".
I really like Tetris. I think the Game Boy version is probably my favorite that I have played, and it's definitely the best version that I've played, but I have enjoyed some bad Tetris games in the past. For example, I spent more time than I probably should have with Tetris Ultimate on PS4. By all accounts, that is a bad version of Tetris, but the core modern Tetris gameplay is still there even if the presentation is unbelievably sterile. So, when you put what is by all accounts a better version of Tetris at me, I should really, really enjoy it, but it just doesn't really connect with me in the way that it seems to have for others.
I should preface that I have not played this game in VR, which, by all accounts, seems to be the superior way to experience this game. I think a lot of the visual gimmicks are really neat in the main campaign mode, but a lot of the levels go by so quickly that they don't really have a lot of impact for me. The soundtrack is something of this game that had been hyped up constantly before I played this game, and I was thoroughly underwhelmed by it in game. It should be noted that the game does some really cool things with its soundtrack as it connects to the actual gameplay, but a lot of the songs I did not enjoy at all, including the game's opening song, which just did not work for me at all.
It's difficult because what is here is very cool and I respect it a lot, and it's clearly a solid game, but I don't know how I ended up feeling underwhelmed by a Tetris game. Perhaps this was not helped by seeing multiple tweets prior to playing the game about how people were brought to tears by the experience. I don't mean to diminish the experience of those people because I 100% believe that the game had that sort of impact on them, but it just left me feeling like I didn't "get" Tetris Effect.
I should preface that I have not played this game in VR, which, by all accounts, seems to be the superior way to experience this game. I think a lot of the visual gimmicks are really neat in the main campaign mode, but a lot of the levels go by so quickly that they don't really have a lot of impact for me. The soundtrack is something of this game that had been hyped up constantly before I played this game, and I was thoroughly underwhelmed by it in game. It should be noted that the game does some really cool things with its soundtrack as it connects to the actual gameplay, but a lot of the songs I did not enjoy at all, including the game's opening song, which just did not work for me at all.
It's difficult because what is here is very cool and I respect it a lot, and it's clearly a solid game, but I don't know how I ended up feeling underwhelmed by a Tetris game. Perhaps this was not helped by seeing multiple tweets prior to playing the game about how people were brought to tears by the experience. I don't mean to diminish the experience of those people because I 100% believe that the game had that sort of impact on them, but it just left me feeling like I didn't "get" Tetris Effect.