When Tetris Effect came out in 2018, I barely noticed. I had heard rummages about a new Tetris game that looked amazing, but I hadn’t seen anything concrete myself. At the end of the day, it’s just Tetris. What could be so interesting about it? Maybe it had the heart-pumping action of the arcade games, or perhaps it was a new mode that people were excited to try out. Either way, I felt like whatever the answer was wouldn’t interest me.
Anyways, I cried watching the trailer for the game. It starts off with a raspy narration of a study into the effects Tetris has on people and escalates slowly: first, playing music, then adding vocals and culminating in a beautiful chorus which has almost become the slogan for the game itself: “it’s all connected”. The dramatic high notes hit you like a truck after the understated nature of the short verse at the start of the video. Just then, watching that trailer, you’re still not entirely sure what Tetris Effect is about, but you do feel what it’s about, and for a game like Tetris, that feels a lot more potent a pitch.
Think about it: Tetris is a game that is almost unbearably abstract. It started as text on a screen, but newer iterations of it aren’t much more complex. A lot of the hallmarks of the game, like T-spins, are modern additions that barely worked on older versions of the game. Explaining why Tetris is fun is, to borrow a quote from Ian Danskin, like explaining why there aren’t any mages on spaceships. That’s just what it is! If you haven’t already played Tetris, it’s near impossible to put into words what makes it unique.
But -and here’s the kicker- you’re almost certain to have played Tetris before. It’s hard to find an estimate for how many people have played the game worldwide, but we don’t need to; if you ask around in your immediate community, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t played it at least once. My grandparents know what Tetris is. My non-gamer friends know what Tetris is. Everyone has tried their hand at it at some point. And it’s precisely that universal nature that makes the experiences in the game so profound. Playing Tetris as a child can be compelling for many reasons, but I think that the most prominent one for most people is that they’ve never been so addicted to a game that’s so simple. Tetris constitutes a foundational gaming experience for many people (myself included), so whatever you think about the game is likely to have been your opinion for a very long time, something that you have maintained for a while and thus feel vindicated in thinking.
And that’s the fundamental problem behind making new Tetris games. Unless you want to do like EA and churn out the same game every year, it’s going to be hard for you to justify the new release of a game that is decades old and basically unchanged. For a long time, studios resorted to the usual videogame tactics: touting improved graphics, or new gamemodes, or polished mechanics. None of these approaches made much of a splash outside of the existing Tetris community because it’s just noise to someone who doesn’t already play Tetris. People can’t connect with new T-spin mechanics the way that they did with the original game in the nostalgic way they remember it.
And that is what I believe Tetris Effect has nailed it, both in marketing and as a finished product. As I said, the game’s marketing doesn’t really tell you what’s up with Tetris Effect mechanically. There are tons of extra challenges in the game, but they aren’t remarked upon in the promotional material. The trailer is dead set on showing you exactly one thing: Tetris Effect is here to remind why you like this game. That you’re not alone in feeling disconnected from the modern Tetris scene. That whatever the game possesses that is so inscrutable is worth exploring. Tetris Effect gets it.
From a mechanical standpoint, there’s nothing that makes Effect different from other modern Tetris games. The main campaign of the game is, when stripped bare, a series of games of Tetris at different speeds, which is nothing new. But what makes the game interesting is the environments that the game takes place in. A single sitting of the campaign mode may take you to a desert, space, a party on an island, the bottom of the ocean and a bustling city, all with a matching soundtrack for each occasion. The game goes out of its way to make sure that you understand that its aesthetic implications come first: the speed at which the pieces drop varies depending on what’s going on in the environment, which in turn reacts to what you are doing with the pieces. The scenes themselves aren’t even videos or 2D animations; they’re fully rendered, 3D environments. Effect even lets you move the camera slightly to get a good view of everything that’s going on.
The nature of the game being such, it’s less absorbing for its gameplay and more for its vibes and themes. Taking Tetris to every possible, beautiful location makes it seem like the developers wanted you to understand the relation between the abstract and the specific. Tetris isn’t just a game where you drop blocks and lines disappear, it can be as calm as the deepest ocean trench, as riveting as the busiest city, as thrilling as a party with your people or as eye-opening as a religious experience. Tetris isn’t anything specifically, but it’s also everything in a broader sense.
As someone who has been playing a lot of Tetris lately, I have to admit that I’m very moved by what Tetris Effect achieves. My personal view of the game is that it’s the perfect representation of how tasks work in the human world, how you have to make order out of chaos, how to know when the risk is worth the reward and how to make the most out of what you’re given. I myself have visited the deep, and I can confirm that it’s all connected.
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