Tetris Effect
Taking a trip into Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest audiovisual concept album
PS4, PSVR
The development codename for Tetris
Effect is Trip, an entirely accurate shorthand for Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest exploration of synaesthesia. It’s also one that could feasibly be applied to just about every game he’s ever made.
As elevator pitches go, ‘Miz does Tetris’ is just about perfect – yet it only tells half the story. At a surface level, yes, this is Lumines with Tetris blocks, Rez Infinite’s optional, yet essential VR mode, and Area X’s dizzying particles. Yet that is not the whole story; what is most surprising about Tetris Effect is how, well, surprising it is. If you’re reading Edge, chances are you’ve played some Tetris over the years. Not like this you haven’t.
Tetris Effect is designed to mess with you. The headline mode, Journey, is an album-like excursion through different sonic and visual palettes. Clear 36 lines, and the stage ends, a brief flourish of sound and particles heralding the arrival of the next song. So far, you might think, so Lumines. At first, that’s pretty much how it plays out. Then out of nowhere, midsong, a spike. The BPM doubles, even triples, the game speed naturally rises in tandem, and what was a chilled lounge number becomes a frantic jazz freakout. After it happens for the first time, you’re left weirdly on edge. It’s
Tetris, so it’s relaxing. But you never know quite where the next shift is coming from.
“That’s definitely our intention. We want to create that kind of emotional movement,” Mizuguchi tells us. “Tetris is so simple and so minimal, but we wanted to add a totally new feeling using our audiovisual expression, a new kind of storytelling. This is a totally new journey compared to Lumines and Rez.”
These variations are born, in part, by Mizuguchi’s philosophy for how VR games should work. While Journey is broken up into sections – every few stages, you’re given a ranking and asked if you want to continue – the team wanted to challenge the belief that VR sessions could only be 15 minutes long. “We felt that, if we got the design right, you could play for an hour. It took a long time – a lot of experiments and testing – but I’m confident we’ve hit a good balance.” In terms of mechanics, you might think
Tetris to be sacred. Yet Mizuguchi and the team at Enhance have been afforded a quite significant amount of leeway (thanks in no small part, you suspect, to Mizuguchi’s longtime friendship with Henk Rogers, chairman of the Tetris company). The signature addition here is Zone mode, which you activate with a squeeze of the trigger once a meter has been filled by clearing lines.
The beat fades away and time stops. Blocks no longer fall, giving you as long as it takes for the meter to deplete again to clear all the lines you can. It’s a dual-purpose system, allowing experienced players an opportunity to boost their high score – the level’s line count freezes, you score more points per clear while Zone is active, and removing a total of eight lines raises your score further – while giving the less skilled a breather, and a chance to clear out a busy board during one of the soundtrack’s peaks. It’s smart stuff, enhancing the core of Tetris without compromising it.
The Tetris Company does insist on certain modes – Marathon is here, naturally – but it has been a willing, and fascinating, partner. “They have big documents that explain all the particulars,” says vice-president of production
Mark Macdonald. “You wouldn’t believe how much exact stuff there is. Like, how does a piece rotate once it’s pushed up against the side? They’ve been making and licensing this game for 30 years now. You might think you know how Tetris works. To get our prototype up and running, we just went ahead and did it. Then they said, okay, let’s go through all the
real Tetris stuff. We did it and of course, it felt a million times better.”
We can tell. If you’d told us at the start of 2018 that one of our most hotly anticipated games come winter would be a Tetris game, we’d have laughed you out of the room. But this is what Mizuguchi does. He’s built a career on confounding expectations, on making seemingly simple things feel like they’ve come from another planet. We leave our demo desperate to get back out there.
Chances are you’ve played some Tetris over the years. Not like this you haven’t