The Long Game
Progress reports on the games we just can’t quit, featuring Tetris Effect
Somehow it’s been two years since Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s exquisite, synaesthesia-powered take on Tetris arrived with us, having seemingly been beamed down from another planet with the sole purpose of making our own a brighter, more empathetic place. (If it failed in that regard, then that’s simply because not enough people played it.) Surely, with due deference to the Game Boy edition, the finest update of Alexey Pajitnov’s classic puzzler to date, in VR it was the most enveloping Tetris had ever been, a heartfelt hymn to humanity and the natural world that celebrated the ties that bind all things. Yet its spirit of togetherness was undermined slightly by its focus on solo play: in seeking to connect us with the universe, it didn’t do much to help us bond with our fellow man. Enter Tetris Effect: Connected, with a suite of multiplayer modes to support that emotional Journey.
Score Attack is your classic one-on-one Tetris in contemporary trappings: perfectly enjoyable but conventional, and it was always going to be here. In Zone Battle, multiple-line clears and combos will fill up your opponent’s well as usual, but the time-freezing Zone mechanic gives both players the chance to turn the tide, as you pause your growing stack and hurriedly fill lines to potentially send a mountain of blocks across to the other side. Yet it’s the titular mode that proves the real game-changer. Here, three players fight it out against an AI opponent, which uses a range of tricks to disrupt each player – moving the matrices about, while causing neat stacks to become a mess of protrusions that take several drops to tidy up, and dropping huge pieces in just as you’ve made room to drop in a line tetromino or two.
Then, thrillingly, comes your opportunity to strike back. Once your individual contributions have filled a gauge, the percussion builds to a crescendo as the vocal of Connected (Yours Forever) kicks in and the matrices unite to form a single, wide playing field. You and your two allies, apart but together, suddenly find yourselves in the Zone, literally and metaphorically. Taking it in turns, you’ll work as a team – watching ghost pieces and adjusting your next move accordingly, plugging gaps or laying the groundwork for your teammates to apply the finishing flourishes to your silently coordinated comeback. The sense of collective triumph as a devastating attack lands is undeniable; this is Tetris as a form of communication, and it’s magical. If Connected doesn’t quite usurp the VR mode in our hearts, it’s perilously close – and with the multiplayer element not landing on Quest and PSVR until the summer, experiencing this in 4K HDR right now is the closest thing the Xbox Series consoles have to a killer app.