bit Generations: Coloris

While Coloris sits on a match-three foundation, it distinguishes itself from similar titles through a Mizuguchi-esque approach to player-guided sound evolution. With the help of jittery art-pop musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius), the team at Skip layers inputs and playfield updates with scratchy samples, sidechained against an LFO or glazed with brittle reverb. Each square on the playfield decays into garbage when left untouched, and as they get closer to their transformation they pulse quicker and quicker. Lines scroll, dots shimmer, each block’s skin turns itself inside out, bugs crawl across, and leaves fall, each shimmering at an increasing clip until burning out with the gasp of a synth pad sting. At the game’s end, each sound effect comes together into an arrangement of blocks snapping on and off in rhythm as Oyamada presents his overarching composition. Even as the game seems to sputter on its own premise, dialing back the visual flair on the last few stages, the way it coalesces in this finale makes it clear that the campaign serves as a vehicle for sonic ideas. The player has space to contextualize the stems in their own way, pushing through until their final form is revealed.

Although the use of color as a block differentiator isn’t unusual for match-three games, the implementation here leans more heavily into it: each block color falls on a spectrum, and the player alters each block’s color by altering its hue towards one end or the other. For example, a stage may use a spectrum between red and blue, with various shades of purple falling in between. If the cursor is red, clicking on a block will make it more red unless it’s already purely red; the player can see the next cursor color by looking at the border around the score tracker at the top of the screen, although they have no control over cursor color beyond that. Once blocks of identical colors are matched, they disappear and let new blocks fall in the top, as one would expect. The main confounding factor here takes us back to the garbage decay mechanic: the player can’t farm a particular spot on the field and instead must cycle around the board to avoid garbage proliferation, as removing garbage requires creating two separate matches nearby, and garbage near the top of the screen will keep blocks from falling, keeping swaths of the field empty. It seemed like from my playing that when a block is dropped, its decay slows or rewinds, and thus comboing at the bottom of the field is generally preferable than at the top? This never seemed to completely remove the decay, and thus I imagine that whatever effect it has can’t be leaned upon for the length of a whole match.

In Advanced 9, a cherry blossom tree takes over the frame, with its leaves falling through the blocks to indicate their decay timer. At its best, the game leans on imagery such as this to elevate its less innovative gameplay experience. The circle on the block in the second row is a powerup that removes all other blocks of the same color when matched.

The second half of the game switches from a single color axis to a full color wheel between red, yellow, and blue, with challenge escalating on the granularity of the shade gradations between each. This introduces a new wrinkle: if the cursor is one color, and a block of a shade that lies between the other two primary colors is clicked, it instantly turns to garbage. The single-spectrum levels suffer somewhat from virtually any match being within reach thanks to fewer, closer shades, but in this multi-spectrum paradigm, mixing blocks from different spectrums can make forcing certain matches extremely inefficient, especially when attempting to outpace decay. This mechanic would make multi-spectrum levels the superior mode by far if it wasn’t for a particular game-breaking interaction… there are two powerup blocks that activate when matched, where one removes blocks in an X-shaped pattern from the point of the powerup, and the other removes all blocks on the field of the same color. By making one of these latter powerup blocks into garbage on purpose and then breaking it with two adjacent matches, every single garbage block on the field will instantly disappear. It’s a smart interaction (though it might make more sense if it differentiated between unbroken and half-broken garbage, since each has its own shade), but it also makes these levels rather solvable for survival. The primary “Clear” mode requires the player to hit an implicit score to pass (it’s shown as a bar in that aforementioned colored border), and this score will freeze while garbage is on the field, but using this trick makes mass decay a non-issue, especially since the game seems to let powerups flow freely when garbage overtakes the screen.