There’s a phenomenon in video games that people call “the zone”: a state of mind-body oneness where your reflexes and senses feel that they are operating without conscious input. The zone isn’t the territory of blockbuster shooters or narrative adventures: it is the domain of puzzle and rhythm games, arcade shmups, games about patterns and reflexes. These are games that temporarily and pleasurably hijack your neural pathways.
Enter Tetris Effect, fittingly named for the hypnagogic hallucinations experienced by people who’ve spent so much time stacking blocks that they visualise falling tetrominos whilst falling asleep, or idly imagine arranging furniture into neat lines. First released last year on PlayStation 4 and newly available on PC, it is a sumptuous, mind-altering, humanist interpretation of the classic Soviet puzzle game. It combines the simple, pleasing act of fitting shapes together until they disappear with intense visual backdrops and dynamic music that shifts and bends around your play. If you have the equipment, it does all of this in sensorily immersive virtual reality.
This might sound ridiculous, but the result is that Tetris Effect has a powerful emotional impact. As you clear blocks in the very first stage, sound builds from ambient strings and odd nature-inspired noises to full song. Forms of humans, whales and plants briefly materialise and disappear from luminescent particles that pulse to the beat. This is one stage of 30: others take the imagery in directions that evoke Earth, water and the human experience, sometimes replicating the imagery that the brain idly generates for itself, from interlocking cogs to unsettling fire, pulsing geometry to deserts, space and the sky. The music shifts from sounds of sand and nature to electronic beats, drums and human voices, combining all of them in its most euphoric moments.
Euphoric is the best word for Tetris Effect. It makes my skin tingle and my mind sink into a state of receptive bliss. It is, somehow, a puzzle game about the extraordinary experience of being alive on this Earth. And if that sounds totally insane: try it. You’ll soon understand.
