There are, generally, two modes of Tetris. There is the methodical mode, a game of precision, planning, and geometry. It's the beautiful game, the king's game, where you fit the squares into their rightful place, eliminating line by line, tetromino by tetromino, tetris by tetris, frame by frame, block by block. This is how most of us like to imagine that we play Tetris.

The second mode is a mode of chaos and hubris. A game of failing to spin a single plate. You clumsily misplace a block or, you're managing your board and -- fuck, how are you supposed to fit that piece in here? And from there, you desperately try to dig yourself out of the hole. This is how most of us actually play Tetris.

Tetris tends to ping pong between these two modes of play. Even professional and grandmaster Tetris players will eventually find themselves struggling to manage the eternal avalanche of bricks.

Ostensibly a shitpost, Not Tetris is actually a reinvention of Tetris that highlights its most chaotic mode of play. Instead of the cold precision of a grid, this is the messy physics of rigidbodies. There's no way to play this game and not fuck up constantly. There is no precision. You press one button trying to rotate your piece, and it immediately begins to spiral. And once you place it, odds are its going to topple over eventually. Try to get these pieces straight, fucking try, I dare you. Eventually, it's not a tower with a few nooks and crannies, it's mostly crannies and a few nooks. When you finally manage to clear a line, slices a straight line across the board, with bits and pieces left behind, as you build higher and higher on a mountain of debris. "How did I let it get this bad?", you ask, knowing full well how and why it got this bad.

It's a novelty at first, but you get the creeping sensation of familiarity: you made the mess. Now try and clean it up.