You make all these small choices, and the consequences stack up. Each is contingent on what came before. Each carries that contingency forward to the next piece. There on screen you see a well of contingency, the past made visible. The pleasure of wiping it away, line by line, is the pleasure of wiping away your past, the perfect setups and the little mistakes both. This is perhaps the ultimate fantasy of Tetris: that you can wipe away the contingency of the past, deepen your well, give yourself more time.

Tetris itself isn’t timeless. It won’t be played forever. It’s not the perfect game. What a boring idea about videogames, and art. Tetris Effect’s actual achievement is its felt relevance in 2018. That it met our grim current context with old school optimism and a hard puzzle heart. Warmth and pressure. What we need and what we know. Would it have resonated like this five years ago? Will it still five years from now?

Which is not to say Tetris Effect doesn’t stumble in the present. It’s a little too neat. It could have been weirder, wilder, cheesier. Placing Native American riders and Balinese rituals alongside dolphins, hot air balloons, and crystalline pop epiphanies, as if everything can be equally thematized, is a real mistake. And the VR mode throws off the balance of concentration and sensory overload necessary for long plunges into the effect.

It’s in fact the effect of its title that excites me most going forward. More subject, less object. Or at least a more openly subjectified object. I want to see more effects explored, not just the ecstatic and hypnotic and sublime. I want even more unexpected effect modes that don’t add ‘value’ but play out variations on a theme. Videogames as musical fugues that induce psychological fugue states. I’m not talking reskins or remakes or reboots but delirious remixes and deliberate transformations. Not for all time, but for now. Right here. This moment.

I played this when it first came out on PS4 and have been returning to it with the EGS version. People might scoff and say "it's tetris lol" but this game means business. Taking a rather unknown music producer by the name of Hydelic, asking him to make like 40+ songs of varying genres and styles, and managing to have an art team keep up with the pace is like the planets aligning. As far as single-player Tetris experiences go, it really doesn't get much better than this (Besides maybe DS or Axis). The journey mode is dope, the effect mode has all the side modes that die-hards love, and even just the general feel of the controls is at a peak of the franchise. The worries I had that this game might be plagued by the visual/latency problems that other UE4 games have seen were in the past once I got my pace really going. The only real thing this game makes me yearn for is some sort of multiplayer experience (especially considering the marketing reliance on the word "connected"), but the new edition coming next year seems to be taking my desires blowing them out of the water. The developers seemed to set out on a specific vision and completely nailed what they were going for. To me, that's the mark of a perfect game.

I hesitate to call this a masterpiece of game design, because really it's just a slightly better version of Tetris. The Zone addition is interesting, the speed changes are pretty good, but that's it.

Where this game excels, possibly above all others, is in its visual, music, and how they combine. The trailer, despite being one of the best game trailers I've ever seen, isn't the best you'll see of this games fabulously immersive environments. I don't think I can really describe what it feels like to play Tetris Effect - you just have to play it.

If you want, you can look up some of the environments through the level names. My favourites are probably The Deep, Metamorphis, Jellyfish Chorus, Yin and Yang, Orbit, Ritual Passion, Downtown Jazz and Dolphin Surf.

If you don't have VR, only get this if you really want to. This really is a VR-Exclusive game when it comes down to it.