Lumines Arise PC Review By PixelHunted 9/10 *Lumines Arise is an incredible game played on any size screen* ⏹️🟥🟧 @enhance_exp #IndieGame #GameDev

Many of you will know what it’s like to feel the cold hand of Father Time on your shoulder when it comes to gaming. Such is the case when I booted up Lumines Arise and grimly realized I’ve been playing this game for… Christ. 20 years…. Where did the time go?

I picked up the original Lumines in 2005 along with my shiny new PlayStation Portable. After Rez on Dreamcast I’d become a firm Tetsuya Mizuguchi fan, and his stylish little puzzler had me hooked. A year later, I had Lumines II, and in 2018 I was pleased to see the game return in shiny enhanced form as Lumines Remastered.
There’s only one problem. Despite owning Lumines three times and having sunk many hours into it, I suck at it. The problem is, simply, that my brain is wired for Tetris. When I see blocks falling from above into a grid, the Tetris neurons activate and begin mentally preparing myself to make lines: a recipe for disaster in Lumines.

Success here is creating 2x2 boxes of contrasting colors, with those boxes being cleared away by a line that sweeps the screen from left to right, and Tetris-thinking just doesn’t cut it. But knowing the theory didn’t mean I was any good. But, finally, with the excellent Lumines Arise, I got it. Finally, after all this time, Arise made me actually good at Lumines!

At its most fundamental level, Lumines Arise does for Lumines what Tetris Effect did for Tetris. The core puzzling is intact, wrapped in a gorgeous blanket of imaginative reactive backdrops and a killer soundtrack.

The result is a dazzling slice of block-dropping action that’s the best release in the genre since Tetris Effect. In the core ‘Journey’ mode you play through four or five levels in sequence, moving to the next once you’ve achieved a specified number of cleared squares. There are also mission and multiplayer modes that I’ve only dabbled in that seemed enjoyable, and that I will return to.

But ‘Journey’ blew me away from start to finish. The stage transitions are as dazzling as they are disorientating: being tossed from an ultra-chill nature-inspired backdrop with low-tempo ambient music to a suddenly bustling cityscape with a fierce grime beat and aggressive play rhythms. Each track is a banger, ranging from pumping trance to pop that sounds suspiciously like Taylor Swift, to frantic jazz piano, to orchestral beauty and beyond. All are excellent, hats off to producer/composer Hydelic for an all-timer soundtrack.

Each track loops and evolves throughout the stage before you move on, and there’s always a moment of confusion after a stage transition as you process what the blocks have transformed into this time: umbrellas, bicycle wheels, tomatoes, acorns, road traffic signs, bird eggs… You need to quickly parse this and keep clearing blocks or face an unceremonious annihilation.

Arise is hard and requires smart, strategic block placement, but it is also tolerant of you screwing up. If you run out of space (you will), you can simply choose to continue from the beginning of that stage rather than heading back to the beginning of the sequence, albeit at the cost of a high score (and a rather deflating booing as you score a D ranking).

There’s also the genius “Burst” mode. As you clear blocks, a meter begins charging and can be activated once it’s 50% full (with a time bonus for waiting until 100% full). This is your Get Out of Jail Free card, letting you rapidly stack up a gigantic block of a single colour. The feeling when you wipe a hundred plus blocks off the board at once is exhilarating, and the cherry on top of that is that all the blocks of the other color then fall, setting off a whole new cascade of 2x2 squares.

I began playing Lumines Arise on my Steam Deck OLED, and it looked utterly fantastic. On Steam Deck the game absorbed me so much that I missed my train stop while commuting to work. But, despite enjoying every second, I was sad that unlike Tetris Effect, this isn’t available on Meta Quest.

Then, a week after I started playing, a brainwave! Wait I can just stream the game from my PC to my Meta Quest 3 and get the full-fat VR puzzling experience. Lumines Arise was already incredible on Steam Deck, but in VR? Outright transcendental.

Like Tetris Effect VR before it, playing it like this induces a virtual euphoria like coming up on drugs. The colours are brighter! The backdrops enveloping me! The music’s coming through me! My brain is fizzing like a punctured battery as it slots together blocks like it never has before!

SUMMARY

Lumines Arise is an incredible game played on any size screen, whether on a 70-inch OLED TV or a handheld. But it shines like a diamond in VR, and I feel privileged that I have the equipment to experience it at its best. It’s one of my games of the year, a title I’ll buy on multiple platforms, and will be a permanent install on any device I own that can run it.

9/10

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