featuring

It is written that when the Sumerian king Gilgamesh first beheld the gleaming ramparts of Uruk‐Haven, many centuries ago, he said unto his architects: “be sure to save up gaps for those long straight ones, and try your best to start a multiplier”. But then Gilgamesh realised that, by means of temporal fluctuations too nonsensical to explain, he was actually looking at the submissions page for Falling Block Jam 2025, the latest Itch.io “make a thing with a theme” festival, which ran from last week till today.

Falling block games! Such a simple concept, capable of so many perversions. I have played a handful of the jam’s 239 entries and found them to be enjoyable, if often rudimentary. As is the style round these parts, I will now try to briefly communicate their enjoyableness to you using words. This is honestly going to be quite difficult, because I keep seeing another entry I want to try.

A pretty one to start: Bloquecitos is a Tetrislike with real-time physics, and blocks that merge to create different-shaped blocks when you match their patterns. It’s a crafty rejig of the developer’s previous Pancitomerge. I’m fond of the mosaic tile patterns, and I like engineering cascades by merging two blocks so that others tumble together.

Image credit: Fáyer / Joven Paul / Rock Paper Shotgun

This Side Up, meanwhile, trades the “falling” component of the “falling block” genre for a gradually retreating 3D camera. You’ve got a shipping crate and you’re trying to fill it with vintage household objects such as cacti, cathode-ray televisions, Nintendo Gamecubes, and lizard tanks.

I strongly relate to this one inasmuch as I had a bunch of stuff in lock-up during a flat move last year. There’s a dark art to filling shipping crates so as to optimise both storage space and retrievability. I do not claim to have mastered this art. After all, I managed to divide up all my paired belongings between separate crates. I had left socks and saucepans in one box, right socks and saucepan lids in another. Get ye behind me, This Side Up! You are bringing back traumatic memories.

Image credit: Apotheum

Professor Gambler’s Bone Scrambler is a falling block game born of the fateful realisation that a thrown die is a kind of falling block. Each turn, it rolls out a line of dice. You then slide the line horizontally to match the blocks below and create combos, or spend points to reroll the set. How do you earn points? From combos. It’s got nice chiptune aesthetics, as you might expect from a game that has also been submitted to GBJAM 13.

A Pico-8 one next. In Recycled Blocks, you control a little laser drone that has to sculpt blocks as they fall to complete work orders and remove them from the board. I found the control scheme a bit confusing, but I love the concept. Ditto the self-explanatory Circuit Makers.

Jelly Well, meanwhile, gets two thumbs up for its subliminal hatred of LocoRocos and for its soundscape of human mouth noises. More of this kind of thing, please. Call of Duty games would sell twice as much if all the gun effects consisted of voice actors yelling “bang”. I would hire Sir Anthony Hopkins to voice an AK47, myself.

Image credit: Walaber Entertainment

Simply scrolling the Falling Block Jam submission feed makes me feel as though I’m losing badly at Tetris, so I’ll resist the urge to write up any more. OK, one more, but only because it doesn’t require a computer: Doctor Vs Virus is a table-top falling block game you can play with a standard deck of cards.

If you see any others you like, please rotate and slide them dextrously into the comments below. Why not see if you can form a line with people recommending the same game – I’ll try to add some block-clearing score attack functionality to our moderation software.

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