It can always be a surprise when you receive an email with an appointment for a preview and see the “Unannounced Game” in massive text. This surprise can be positive or negative, sometimes both, from my past experience of accepting an appointment last year with “Unannounced Title”, which was an upgraded version of New World as New World: Aeternum. I love New World–I spent months working on it for guides work with the game being of my favourite MMOs, but when you mosey in, and are given hands-on to play the starting tutorial of a game you basically lived inside at the same time you are told it was the “Unannounced Game?” It can be upsetting, so I cut my hands-on extremely short, but I had lovely interviews with the New World: Aeternum developers.
Fast-forwarding to earlier this week, an all-new Lumines was the “Unannounced Game.” The last time an entry in the series was released was in the before times, with almost eight years since Lumines Remastered and almost a decade since the release of Lumines: Puzzle & Music. It is pretty bewildering, but in an exciting manner. As a, “Wait. Lumines titles are still being developed?” This time around, because of the wildly popular Tetris Effect (2018), the team at Enhance is involved with this new Lumines, and me playing for about 10 minutes, you can definitely tell this is a Lumines title in a post-Tetris Effect world–complimentary.
I did not get a chance to play too much Tetris Effect, but when I did play a few years back, this was years after many patches and updates, so I did get to try additional modes, such as online multiplayer with a mate. Tetris Effect originally was focused on its single-player story mode and the narrative that unfolds through its dozens of levels, which is a refreshing concept/idea to bring to Tetris, which has not been known or heralded much for a story mode in its main menu selection.
This was my first time actually playing Lumines with Arise. I could easily see these Effect influences take something beloved by players of Lumines, now reinvigorated through the lens and team of Effect. In Arise, you have to correctly match shapes, titles, and boxes so as not to have your screen fill up for a game over, but also make sure a line that passes through the entire tileset is able to refresh and give you both the levity and freedom to not get a game over. In real time, it is a lot to take in, even with the game’s tutorial that takes you through the game’s mechanics for old and new players. There is so much going on, and I was also interviewing at the same time as I told PR/developers that interviewing at the same time with hands-on is the best and easiest way for everyone involved, while I listened to the game’s music, matching tiles together, and making sure the line going through the tileset was all working in tandem.
I was not given too much time to actively play Arise, since at the start of my session, I gave 20+ minutes of my hands-on opportunity with the game to a mate who missed their earlier appointment, while I interviewed one of the developers, while my mate was very zoned into Arise. Seeing another person next to me play the game, be utterly and undoubtedly locked in, while I spoke to the developer without a controller in my hands, showcased entirely how this game was going to grab people wholeheartedly. It is sometimes difficult in the moment to observe, gauge and/or be aware, if you as the player will lose their life to a game, but seeing a colleague play the game next to me with headphones on and barely saying a word in the 20+ minutes of playtime–it is a special moment that could not have happened in any other facet. I just wanted to aid a peer who missed their appointment because, to me, I can always play the game later, I would hope, but getting to chat with a developer from Enhance on Tetris Effect alongside about the immediate team working with the Lumines developers in tandem is something I uniquely experienced for my Arise appointment.
To me, since I was a kid, it has always been about the developers and creatives involved with a project, and I will take that opportunity to speak with any of them over playing a game if I am given only one option. It takes magic to ship a game (nowadays), so with less than 10 minutes on my Arise appointment left for me to actually get hands-on experience to play the game, I already saw more than enough from a peer playing the game next to me to understand the game more intimately, if I had actually played it beyond a non-tutorial level. The silent dedication and focus on Arise may not have been something I could truly experience in that moment, but seeing someone else have that next to me on a couch truly showcased a pleasantly unique appointment, and definitely the ideal game to exhibit all of this.
A bombastic Lumines title that is going to grab Tetris aficionados, Lumines sickos, and players that have only dabbled here/there with these two series. One of my favourite games is Chime, and even though the developer did not know anything about that rhythm/music/tileset game from more than a decade ago, to me, Arise was very much Chime-coded because of the mechanics in Chime to fill out tilesets and create music with a transparent line going through the entire levels that I could not shake Arise’s similarity. While writing this sentence, I see that Chime made a sequel with Chime Sharp. Arise was able to mentally reenergize my love of a genre I have been lacking in playing for more than a decade.
If you lost your life playing Tetris Effect or any of the Lumines titles over the years, then you will absolutely lose your life to Lumines Arise. From chatting with one of the developers, it seems that more post-release patches and updates will be released similarly to Tetris Effect over the years, but it is also extremely early to tell, with Arise having a release date of some time later this year on PS5 and PC.
Hopefully, I can play more than seven minutes of Lumines Arise one day, but I truly had the best Lumines Arise appointment at Summer Game Fest that just could not be replicated. Even if I never get the opportunity to play Lumines Arise for 10+ minutes for whatever reason–I just wanted to help a mate get an appointment, and I was elated that it was my own.
