Tall: Infinity

Grid-based puzzle games usually project the playfield as a flat surface; Tall: Infinity bucks this by wrapping it around a vertical cylinder, tying the edges of the playfield together and incorporating gravity. While the player’s avatar can freely walk up walls and fall from great heights, when rolling a block they can only surmount edges that are one row higher, and they need a column’s worth of head start to gain the “momentum” to roll up. The game’s matching focus has players pressing together sides of blocks with identical colors,¹ but the orientation of the block consistently rotates 90 degrees when pushed to an adjacent column, and flipping the block in-place isn’t possible. However, rolling the block onto a higher row actually rotates the block 180 degrees, thus making elevation changes the primary method of reorienting blocks. Since matching blocks spawns additional blocks in the matched column, it’s easy to accidentally build giant peaks without the gradual changes that enable reorientation; managing stack height to maintain reorientation opportunities naturally pushes the player away from constant matching in favor of doing light playfield management throughout a session as well.²

The additional blocks gained from matches depend on the orientation: vertical matches raise the matched column, horizontal matches raise the column on either side, and simultaneous matches across multiple sides of a block stack the effects, potentially adding 10 blocks at once to the playfield with two horizontal and a vertical match at all once. Initiating a match also starts a chain timer, symbolized by an angelic pair of wings that float off-screen. Chains summon a corresponding number of blocks from the ground once terminated, which helps distance the player from the “border line.” This line gradually moves up row by row (the player gets a five-row buffer on each stage), removing color as it progresses and ending the game once it reaches the player’s top complete row.³ Interestingly, the rules explicitly stop the chain timer when you’re on a falling block, making gravity more than just natural consequence of the tower setup. Hitting a match and quickly dropping your block off to one of the sides to score a second match mid-fall becomes essential to maintaining chains, since the timer will quickly die if you don’t have a nearby setup in place.

The quick combo starter here would be to roll the player’s current block two to the left to connect on the yellow, but what to do after that isn’t necessarily clear. Alternatively, the block to the right of the character could match with both the yellow and blue to the left, but repeatedly rotating the yellow/blue block against the middle one to get it in the right orientation might take a significant amount of moves and time. [src]

The knock-on effect of this is that throwing blocks off of tall sections encourages blind play. With only four colors, it’s not uncommon to build a stack where rolling off either side will give you another match for free, even if you’re so high up that you can’t see the blocks below you. This is compounded by the random block spawns, which make the chains often feel more like quick-draw matching based on new blocks rather than arranging setups based on old ones. Setup-based play could have been encouraged had blocks shifted up in the column from the ground rather than new ones appearing on top.⁴ From watching high-level play, actually preparing chains seems to be less potent than throwing as many darts as possible and hoping one hits, either by chucking blocks in every which way off of tall stacks or idly rolling blocks around in hopes that a match will naturally occur. Where abstractly the playfield shape management is vital, the actual color combinations skew more impulsive, which perhaps increases frantic play in exchange for dampening the long-term thinking.

Still, there are a few other mechanics that help power additional conscious engagement. As a play session progresses, blocks that only roll in one direction become increasingly common, potentially locking row edges in place if a one-way block’s only possible direction is straight into other blocks with no room for a aforementioned head start to roll it up. On the scoring end, the customary time bonus comes with a step bonus that only pays out if you finish a stage in under 300 moves, tracked on-screen during play for those interested in maximizing their skill. Otherwise the package keeps it simple. Your tower escalates into the sky, going past the cloud cover and deep space before the atmosphere suffuses back into view as you seemingly broach the gates of heaven. It would perhaps bear the kind of daunting weight the ominous title screen seems to imply if your character wasn’t a dapper dandy stick figure, twirling his cane and tapping his foot as he strides about. If his pelvic thrusting on each roll of a block doesn’t sit well with you, there’s a female equivalent to play as, as well as, for some reason, a worm.