Endless and Luminous

I CLOSE MY EYES ONE NIGHT, and my mind fills in the spaces between the void with blocks. Sometimes they’re vegetables, sometimes computer components or orbs of storm-clouds or the sun. As they drop into the play-field, they form larger blocks of one colour, which get picked up and erased as a timeline moves over them, the play-field as a whole ebbing and flowing from clean to messy and then to clean again. I can’t stop thinking about Lumines Arise.

A Game About Blocks

Lumines Arise is a bit difficult to explain. It’s a bit like Tetris, while also being completely unrelated—it’s a game about forming 2×2 squares that get cleared with every measure of the track, as a timeline sweeps along the screen. Clearing enough squares progresses you to the next “skin,” where the level changes look and feel, the blocks changing from computer fans to vegetables to noughts and crosses that form faux QR codes when you get enough of them together before the timeline sweeps them out, as the soundtrack (this time around, done by the in-house team of Hydelic and Takako Ishida) effortlessly flows from ambient to neo-classical to trance and back again.

Musak Non Stop / A Game About Humans

The soundtrack is a grab bag of various genres and moods; a slow-paced ballad about sticking through tough days fits in just as much as a track backing a rave in a spider web and a speeding train tempting you to go as fast as you can to outrun the blocks’ fast drop rate. There are a few outliers—mainly in the vocal tracks, like Sky Falls Down or Only Human, a lot of the songs feel background music to television shows; something to fill an otherwise empty void (the proper term being “production music,” or the trademarked Musak.) I do have reason to think that the generic-sounding tracks were intentional, somewhat; the game’s composers weren’t trying to be revolutionary; they were trying to relatable; maybe even human, which feels increasingly important in an age where the sanctity of art and true human connection is in as much peril as it is.

Snapshots of People and Things / A Game About Everything

Lumines Arise, just like its 2018 counterpart Tetris Effect, feels more than the sum of its parts. It’s a puzzle game, sure, but it’s also something greater—it’s a game about everything; each level is a moment in time, a snapshot, of a place or a thing. One level is in a kitchen with a chef making beats out of slices and knife-on-board kick drums, another shows people dancing around the edges of an EDM concert as laser machines shoot rays into the sky. In another, birds flash on screen, and the blocks become eggs that crack open with the timeline to breakneck jazz, and another has a pair of chameleons headbanging and raving, with the next track feeling before landing on a stage where the playfield tilts with the weight of the board, as marbles become ping-pong balls and small toy robots before escalating to becoming the earth and moon—a hammy metaphor, but, at this point, I feel like Arise isn’t trying to be anything other than over-the-top, melodramatic relishing in sensation; it’s sappy, self-indulgent at times, but it feels sincere—something desperately needed in these time; like a celebration of people made of light and sound, something of an antidote to the Cynical World we find ourselves living in.