Lumines Arise Review – It’s All Connected

After Tetris, but before Tetris Effect, there was Lumines. Creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s engrossing puzzle game was a launch title for Sony’s PSP handheld in 2004 and as the story goes, it was created when issues prevented Mizuguchi’s team from acquiring the Tetris license. It worked out, however, as the core mechanic of Lumines is fantastic. For me, Lumines is second only to Alexey Pajitnov’s enduring classic in terms of puzzle games, and Mizuguchi would eventually secure the license for Tetris Effect years later. Lumines Arise thankfully maintains and feels as good as Lumines always has, and borrowing the aesthetic of Tetris Effect (which Lumines technically did first in many ways) creates an excellent blend of visuals and puzzle bliss.

The basic idea is that multicolored blocks fall into a well, and you must create squares of the same-colored blocks. True to Enhance’s pedigree, it’s all done in rhythm to music, and the squares you manage to create get wiped away. As you drop and rotate blocks, it also creates sound effects that add to the music. This has always been the core idea of Lumines, and it’s recreated well here. The big upgrade with Arise is the presentation.

Like Tetris Effect (and the original Lumines), the visuals, audio, and pace shift and change every few minutes. Success is rewarded with abstract imagery and radically different block styles. One of my favorite levels features giant hands connected to balls of spider silk, while the alternate blocks are pieces of electronic steel. Another features shifting vegetables that slice into pieces when you successfully make them disappear. All of the stages are interesting and bizarre, and even the ones that are less fascinating still let you play Lumines, so it’s impossible to be annoyed or angry at them.

Seeing all the different graphical options is the main attraction for Lumines Arise, and it’s all gathered into a campaign that you can play and beat, which is great. It doesn’t take long to get through all of them, however, and the other modes are just okay. There are lots of puzzle-like tutorials to get through and an online mode to play against others. I had good technical experiences playing multiplayer online and locally, but I had much more fun with the main single-player game and letting it overtake my senses – something you can’t really do when competing against another.

In fact, I found many of the online components distracting. Avatars from other players populate your start screen, and they occasionally show up in the single-player campaign, especially in the later stages. They don’t interfere much, but the presumed sense of community Arise is trying to foster fell flat. I mostly found that everyone was just getting in the way of my desired Lumines experience.

I’m also disappointed that there isn’t something akin to the endless modes of past Lumines games, where you can basically play to see how long you can go and chase a high score. Without that mainstay mode, I wasn’t super incentivized to return to the single-player campaign, even though I loved it.

My complaints, however, mostly amount to minor distractions and a desire for more of what I liked the most: the campaign. The core game is stirring, beautiful, and always engaging. Lumines Arise, like its cousin Tetris Effect, is the kind of game that I won’t delete from my hard drive because I will always want the option to lose myself to the game periodically, which Arise is consistently excellent at.

Playing in VR

Like Tetris Effect, Lumines Arise offers VR support via PlayStation VR2 or SteamVR, depending on your platform. It’s arguably the ideal way to play, but I wouldn’t argue that it is the way you need to play. The advantage of VR is that it lets the game fully take over your senses. Your focus and peripheral vision become all Lumines, and with headphones on, it is easy to be fully absorbed and lost in the sea of falling blocks and music. Like Tetris Effect, it is one of my favorite games to play in VR, but I don’t think you are missing out on the core experience if you’re not wearing a headset. It’s like the difference between watching a movie at home full of distractions, or watching a movie in an IMAX theatre with an attentive crowd. The latter experience is more enthralling, but the story, soundtrack, visuals, and performances are the same.