Tetris Effect developers Enhance have released a new demo for their forthcoming Lumines Arise on Steam, alongside news that the spacey rhythm attack game will launch on November 11th. If you missed Tetris Effect, it’s a game about making deletable lines out of falling blocks while standing in the middle of a very musical supernova.
Lumines Arise, meanwhile, sees you arranging clumps of blocks into 2X2 scoreable combinations, which are removed from the playing field by a horizontally sweeping Time Line. While standing in the middle of a very musical supernova.
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There have been eight previous Lumines releases, including remasters, on various platforms since the first game’s appearance in 2004. This one is a collaboration with Monstars Inc, who also worked on Rez Infinite. I played a bit of Lumines Arise earlier this year, and spoke to an Enhance developer about its new emphasis on expressing “the human”, which is what sets it apart thematically from Tetris Effect. I’ll get that write-up turned around before the release date. If I don’t, feel free to quote this piece at me aggressively in the comments on any and all subsequent news articles.
In the short term, I’ll say that Arise is yet another pacey and flamboyant puzzler that drizzles your occipital lobe in (for example) footage of frenzied chameleons, while challenging your primary motor cortex to save you from total visual constipation. Yes, it’s making bits of your brain fight each other. I like when games do that.
Beyond that, I’m interested to make sense of Arise being a more “human” game than Effect. Much as I enjoyed Tetris Effect, I entertain suspicions that Enhance’s framing of Arise might be bullshit artistry. Perhaps “more human” just means there are more human figures in the background art. Come to think of it, I’m not sure the devs mentioned Enhance’s most recent game, Humanity, during my hands-on – RPS reviewer Kim Armstrong witheringly summarised that as “perfect puzzles pumped with existential hot air”.
Here’s the Steam link for the demo, which will be available from today, August 26th till September 3rd. It includes three stages from the single-player Journey mode and a bit of new multiplayer mode Burst Battle, which can be played online cross-platform. The full game has VR compatibility but there’s none of that nonsense in the demo, and they’ve locked the difficulty to easy. They don’t want to scare you away, after all.
Those damn fool editors of RPS gone by never found time to review Tetris Effect, but they did put it on our list of the best VR games.