Lumines Arise

The burst mechanic (surely drawing from Tetris Effect’s zone mechanic) violates the purity of the elegantly terse Lumines concept on a first impression, as it tacks on an extra meter and lets you blow up the stack on-demand. In a series that already has a friendly, frequent screen clear block type, slapping this on top is a bit overkill, and survival play, which had a low ceiling from the series beginning, gets utterly trivialized in the process.¹ But Lumines is richest in score play, and the burst mechanic throws a major wrench in the game’s brutal measure-to-measure combo system. The burst “minigame” identifies a current square formation and lets you build it up over multiple timeline sweeps, creating a monolith that tosses blocks of the opposing color off-screen. Optimally setting up “seed” squares before initiating the burst requires foresight and tempo, especially when lining it up with a x12 or x16 combo from consecutive multi-square timeline sweeps, although the burst can also salvage a combo that’s about to expire in pinch. Doing the latter is risky, however, as using burst when the meter is between 50% and 99% doesn’t scale the effect (gives you three measures to build compared to a 100% burst’s six) and thus wastes any additional meter you built up over the halfway mark. Tying all of this together, activating burst also freezes the level progression, making any of the squares you clear during the burst period freebies and incentivizing the player to pop burst as often as possible. This makes it your biggest cash cow for score purposes, with the half-meter version gaining more relevance if the player has the skill to juice the monolith with very little time. Doing this circles back to seeding the burst correctly and so on, making the mechanic a potential friend and your biggest stressor at the same time.

For what gets lost here in survival, the game is willing to ignore, splitting the campaign into a set of 10-15 minute levels rather than the full-length gauntlets of the older titles and giving each three proper selectable difficulties.² A new ranking system accompanies the change, and it’s well-tuned, significantly straining the player’s ability to master the new burst dynamics on the hard difficulty, although more in-game information on the scoring system would be appreciated. Bursting in the campaign mode unleashes a flurry of Loomiis, customizable³ representations of other players that you can meet in the multiplayer hub or that spawn in as procedurally generated little nubbins. These swarm around the menus and trail behind you in the interactive credits sequence, emoting and twirling as they fly. For what they lack in aesthetic connection to the skins,⁴ they connect to as vessels of human experience pouring out from the screen, containing a bit of someone else to float around naively around the playfield.

In Rain Steps, a city square in the rain breaks out into a flash mob dance, with the human figures creakily moving as if puppetered. They roll their necks, still seemingly stiff from the scene that came prior. [src]

There is still the same mawkish, uplifting bent from Enhance’s Tetris Effect, but the sugar in the syrup here is thankfully tempered by more variety and reliance on decontextualized bits of cultural ephemera, bringing in more aggressive or unusual soundscapes in the process. Arise is eclectic, dispensing with Effect’s rarefied air as soon as they turn the playfield into a cutting board for a smorgasbord of red and green veggies in Slice & Dice. While the human figures come in abstract at first, whether with the silhouetted striding figure in the game’s title track or the eerie, slender string appendages of Automation Digits, the game doesn’t mind throwing in a plasticine, neo-PlayStation 2 human like the sunbathing woman in Sunset Beach when the mood arises. For these moments, the intent of ethereality present from Effect submerses into a coy, practical spirit for Arise; the playfield is not a beacon of a higher calling, a shibboleth of unconscious action, but rather a hand closing around the material of what appears in these sequences, drowning the blocks in water or having macaques swing about your construction. The game’s penchant for throwing the unexpected at you goes beyond just level-to-level shifts, as the jungle foley of Tropical Survival abruptly segues into EsDeeKid-esque jerk, with parrots on vines thrusting forward to the rhythm. There’s such a rich palette here where seemingly any idea can manifest from the canvas without regard for the outside world. Where Effect draws heavily from its time, Arise drips back into the trance and indietronica of the era the original Lumines came from, not seamlessly, but with rough edges proudly on display, letting these tracks exist alongside the nu-house and other EDM drawn from Effect.

And the wonky variety doesn’t end at the aesthetics. Tucked away in the mission mode are a series of unique challenges with fundamental rule-set changes, removing and adding mechanics willy-nilly in real-time. The initial challenge, which turns your usual 2x2 placed blocks into larger and larger variants, gets poached as an end-of-challenge curveball for many of the others, complicating levels where blocks only drop on-beat or where full columns of blocks randomly drop from the ceiling. The later levels move into even crueler territory, making you build specific patterns in the playfield a la the original PlayStation Portable games⁵ or having the blocks “pogo” off the bottom and into other parts of the stack. Although it’s not advertised up-front, taking the same freedom of purpose from the main campaign and applying it to the mechanics is a methodology I would love to see expanded upon, especially when these challenges have strenuous scoring and ranking on-top of mere completion.