Tetris is the final boss of a lot of video game consoles. For years I kept my NES around, partly, sure, because I think it is uncommonly nice to look at, but mostly because it meant Tetris on the TV. Equally, I reckon there are a lot of Game Boys out there that only play Tetris these days; I have at least two in my house somewhere. After that it starts to get slightly creepy: as the years have passed, my DS is largely still active because of Tetris DS, a Nintendo-themed blow-out marked by scrappy imagination. And if we allow Lumines into the fold, then jeepers: the PSP is never without the Lumines UMD, and my Vita is basically a beautiful machine for playing Electronic Symphony, a game that had the audacity to change the way the fuse block worked – and I loved it for that.
One day I reckon the Switch will be a machine for Puyo Puyo Tetris, Tetris 99 and Lumines Remastered. It is all slightly uncanny really, like the part in a thriller where the idiot who’s about to be killed realises just how far the conspiracy has already spread. And now here’s Tetris Effect: Connected. Not content with being the final boss of the last generation of consoles with Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s luminous spin on the most elemental video game ever, now Tetris Effect is arriving in rejigged form at the of a console cycle. And it’s on Game Pass. What hope is there for any of us?
Tetris Effect: Connected reviewDeveloper: Monstars, Resonair, Stage GamesPublishers: EnhancePlatform: Played on Xbox OneAvailability: Out Now on Xbox, Game Pass, and PC, other platforms in 2021
It’s harmonious, I reckon, that the final boss of a lot of video game consoles now has a mode with a final boss in it. Tetris Effect: Connected is basically Tetris Effect, that cosmic delight, with a multiplayer suite added. (You could argue the leaderboards in Tetris Effect were already a pretty appealing multiplayer suite, but trust me, this is even better.) And the brightest star in the new multiplayer constellation – unwise to go with an analogy there, but Miz does things to me – is Connected itself. Three against one, or more commonly three against an AI. Monster Hunter Tetris. WOW Raid Boss Tetris. Abel Gance’s Napoleon with the three-part-projection Tetris. Jeepers!
Quickly, though, a very brief refresher in Tetris Effect itself. Tetris Effect is Tetris by way of Lumines – it’s been rebuilt around themed skins that bring the audio and visual elements into all kinds of intergalactic resonances, and it’s also borrowed Lumines’ trick of varying the speed of play in interesting ways, so Tetris no longer has that problem of being a game that just gets faster and faster until it’s unplayable. There’s also a Zone slowdown ability that allows you to keep cleared lines on screen for a few woozy seconds so you can build on them, creating clears of six, seven, eight rows at once. The Tetris tower of your hypnagogic fantasies. And there’s a bunch of fascinating experiments that take Tetris and turn it into all kinds of other things. It is literally one of the greatest games of all time and for once I don’t feel particularly weird typing that.
Tetris Effect: Connected – Announce Trailer Watch on YouTube
Anyway! Connected. Connected links you up with two other Tetris players and pits you against an AI boss. Actually it pits you against chains of AI bosses, with different difficulty levels, all built around the zodiac.
What this means is that you and your two allies play separate games of Tetris while the boss also plays their own. The boss’s victories translate into flinging attacks at you that generally mess things around – knocking holes in your lines, or raising the floor, or delivering giant pieces into the well, that kind of thing. Your victories, meanwhile, steadily build a meter that eventually allows you to join up your three games. I am going to say that again in italics, because this is one of those War-Declared moments that newspapers used to live for. You build a meter, right, that So all of a sudden all three of you are taking turns to drop pieces into a very wide shared game of Tetris and clear as many lines as you can. Panoramic Tetris!