Lumines Arise

The pacing melds with the music, each unique track on each level passing through phases of calm and ferocity.

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After Tetris Effect, there’s a sense of repetition about Enhance’s new take on Lumines, another revival of a classic falling-block puzzle game, blessed with the audiovisual bells and whistles afforded by modern gaming hardware. It’s also not unreasonable to suggest that, while Lumines was a classy invention, it could never match Tetris’ incredible efficiency of design. Yet Lumines’ advantage is that it is Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s own creation, explicitly made for his experimental fusions of visual tableaux, soundscapes and flow states. And Lumines Arise pushes that particular design form to its conceivable limit.

For starters, Lumines has its time bar, a vertical line that tracks across the well (wider but less deep than its Tetris equivalent) removing any single-coloured squares you've created as it touches them. As you drop in two-by-two blocks comprising individual tiles of opposing hues, then, connections don’t disappear the moment they're made. Depending on the position of the line, they may remain for a few seconds — time to add to the block to increase a combo, or for it to get in the way when you're in a tight spot. Or they may vanish instantly. Your rhythms of shuffling, rotating and dropping are thus also regulated by this sweeping conductor’s baton, which itself can change pace at points during a level.