Post Script
Charting Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s endless search for the impossible
Lumines was defined by its timeline. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s 2005 puzzle game was all about this sweeping metronome, which moved from left to right across the screen, synced to the current song’s BPM, and removed completed blocks as it passed them. It was confusing at first, particularly during slower numbers, when you’d expect the game to be easier by virtue of the lower tempo. Yet it could often be the opposite, that timeline taking an age to remove clutter from a screen that was getting agonisingly close to full.
The result was a game that insisted you play by its rules, for all that you appeared to have control over the pace of the puzzling and the sounds that were being layered over the soundtrack. In such moments, synaesthesia, the dream which has come to characterise Mizuguchi’s long career, feels agonisingly out of reach. You cannot achieve a perfect synthesis of audio, visuals and game when the latter insists on being louder in the mix, volume-creeping like a frustrated warm-up DJ desperate for the crowd’s attention.
It’s a recurring problem in Mizuguchi’s quest for synaesthesia, which was famously sparked by a night out at a Swiss festival when he was scouting locations for Sega Rally. Rez, the game in which he first started experimenting with the concept, had all the
building blocks: a throbbing club soundtrack, a dizzying light show dressed up as a rail shooter, and sonically appropriate effects for every mechanical interaction available to you. Yet it was, at its core, a shoot-’em-up, and in the thick of a boss battle you were too busy staying alive to think about whether your shots were properly lining up with the music.
So it is here, at times – in particular when Journey mode defies Tetris convention and suddenly ratchets up the game speed by ten levels at once. Yet the elegance with which sound effects are layered on top of the backing track means that, even when you’re focused entirely on staying alive, the music still sounds like, well, music.
And for the rest of the game, when you feel in control and Tetris Effect becomes a performance piece first and a game second, you may wonder whether Mizuguchi has finally done it. Certainly Tetris is perfectly suited to Mizuguchi’s vision of videogame synaesthesia, since it is a game that is often most efficiently played by not playing. Yes, Tetris is a game in which you must arrange blocks into solid horizontal lines. But you spend most of your time in the game not quite doing that, building an elaborate, beautiful structure with an entire column left empty, waiting for the I-block that will clear
four lines at once. Mizuguchi’s games are at their best when you are able to un-play them in order to let the music and visuals share equal prominence with the mechanics. No puzzle game has ever been so brilliantly un-playable as Tetris. No wonder Mizuguchi first sought the licence over a decade ago.
Tetris Effect brings Mizuguchi within touching distance of his goal, but can he ever really reach it? A game is a game, after all, and if the aim is to make our mechanical involvement in proceedings entirely invisible, you might as well just make a visualiser. It seems as if perfect synaesthesia is always going to be tantalisingly out of reach, and perhaps it’s better that way – if only because it will keep Mizuguchi, and the talented teams he is working with in Japan, on the hunt for it.
It explains, too, his newfound obsession with VR (though he claims to have longed for it since he first had the idea for Rez). If a true synthesis of light, sound and play is never quite going to be possible, you might as well work towards it using a technology which makes the already immersive even more so. Rez Infinite and Tetris Effect are wonderful games on a TV but, through a headset, transport you to an entirely different plane. We can’t wait to find out where Enhance will take us next.