Lumines

Mizuguchi’s work incorporates musical elements without tethering it to rhythmic execution challenges. The player becomes an equal contributor to the creative tapestry of the soundscape rather than reciting canned phrases or demanding precision. As you move, rotate, place, and destroy blocks throughout Lumines, your actions directly accent the soundtrack and create new polyrhythmic layers over top of it, leading to a temporally fluid pacing that ebbs and flows with the eye-catching, psychedelic backdrops. The effect is subtle; auspiciously off-beat inputs will not result in any added sounds, and with enough play this absence becomes noticeable. You unconsciously begin to follow the tempo and create your own grooves through your play, and in this way the game manages to gently synchronize your input timing with a moving cursor that removes your grouped blocks. This cursor slides along in perfect sync with the backing track. Your button presses, twitches, and excited exhalations form their own accompaniment to the game, and Lumines codifies these subliminal impulses to alter the player’s behavior without letting them know explicitly.

The core of Lumines is aligning single-color 2x2 squares from mixed-color squares dropping from the top of the playfield. Unlike other block puzzlers, the play area is much wider than it is tall, owing to each song’s four-beat measure that frames the cursor’s sweep. Gravity is also in effect at all times, allowing you to cleave squares into their component blocks when dropping on uneven terrain. The breadth and slow drop speed make survival trivial, but the scoring system provides a x4 multiplier when more than four squares are cleared in a measure, adding additional nuance to stacking. While in best play building up the center will lump the raw materials together for clearing multiple squares at a time, overfilling it will spill blocks over to the sides, unpinning the player’s gaze from the middle columns. Juggling multiple structures across the playfield makes playing around the ever-moving cursor more difficult, as the segments tied to the current and next sweeps constantly expand and shrink. A good player must know how to allocate attention to each section of the stack, banking squares when the cursor is far away and frantically adding squares to hit the threshold of four when the cursor nears the end.

The trails on the blocks and the sparks of light upon a clear help keep the playfield alive, and in this skin (Roundabout), colors pulse throughout the cityscape while the thoroughfare streaks neon.

This dynamic not only propels thinking about the breadth of space but also the stack’s transformation over time. Although one can stall for a measure or two without clearing to ensure squares are only cashed in with a group of four or more,¹ the incessant block drops will fill the field regardless, pushing the player to continually trim their structures. The dual-color of each block comes into play here: sandwiching layers of squares between blocks of the inverse color will cause the outer layers to smash together from gravity once the inner squares clear out. At an intermediate level of play, the player will keep flipping their view of the stack between the two colors per measure, and at expert play, the player will flip per structure across the breadth of the playfield, trying to juice the most out of each measure without deleting the top layer of a sandwich on accident. Past level 150+ or so, the drop speed begins noticeably outpacing the squares being cleared; this begins centralizing stack maintenance around occasional chain blocks. These blocks, when placed inside of a square, will cause the cursor to clear every same-color block it touches, including those adjacent to other cleared blocks. To take advantage of this stack-rupturing power, the player can make sure every block placed touches another of the same color. This creates stacks with alternating veins of color running through them, collapsing and rebuilding cyclically with the chains.

The speed of the cursor amplifies different aspects of the game plan depending on how far you push it in each direction. Slow speeds punish those who overfill the playfield by clearing infrequently, while fast speeds tighten the window to hit the bonus multiplier threshold. Instead of scaling in one direction or the other, the developers instead go for a playlist approach, veering the tempo up and down across the course of the track list. Although the game begins with the iconic, indietronica-tinged Shinin’ by Mondo Grosso,² the majority of the soundtrack was handled by Takayuki Nakamura, a Sega stalwart from the early Virtua Fighter days who transitioned to freelance work in the 2000’s. While he stars off with big beat and electro in the same 120-130 bpm comfort range that Shinin’ inhabits, he dispenses with straight melody and rhythm as you work through the song list. Meguro drops into a Ruins-esque uneven groove blanketed with eerie samples coated with delay, Big Elpaso sprinkles syncopated hi-hat chirps through wavering string and horns pads, using portamento for stings reminiscent of chopped-and-screwed big band, and Just… lets its breakbeats chatter away under alternating flutes, sax, and wind chimes. When he’s not working in guitar-centric tracks (as in the weaker Aback and Spirits), his unhinged commitment to slicing his own work to pieces, constantly swapping drum loops, and letting vocal samples scream out of time play right back into the chaos that the user-triggered clips bring. He has his moments varying up tempo as well, such as on the blistering fast Strangers or the reggae drag of Holiday in Summer, but it’s the songs from Eri Nobuchika’s first single that really drag the tempo down to a crawl, with both I Hear the Music In My Soul and Lights being <65 bpm heaters. On the first you’ll be enjoying the break while your drop speed is still slow, while on the latter, the final track of the game, you’ll be clinging on for dear life to whatever space remains as the cursor dawdles across the playfield.