I bounced off of Puyo Puyo when I tried it on the Switch. The setups, the chains, the way you gotta stack things just so, so you can pull off a humongous combo and utterly break your opponent in two... It's beyond me. My game brain grew up with tetris. It built itself around tetris. We like simple, here.

Lumines manages to fit itself very comfortably in the "simple" category. Make squares, don't let the board fill up, easy. And yet, that chain and stack that threw me off of Puyo makes an appearance here as well, with two key differences: there's only two colors (simple!) and more importantly, the blocks don't vanish right away. The magic eraser cursor is tied to the tempo of the song you're currently listening to, meaning you can stack up a massive shape of squares upon squares before they're actually removed, which then ALSO lets you plan out how the blocks above THOSE will fall and slot nicely next to the OTHER blocks, and oh my god, this game is really, REALLY good. My thumbs hurt typing this because of how much I've been abusing my D-pad trying to clear the time trials and CPU vs modes (which are both BS hard by the way, and the VS mode is a bit unbalanced by nature, but it's fine).

Given its origins as a Vita game, this is very much an easy hop-in-for-a-while experience... Although, if you're going to try and clear the classic challenge, that's probably going to take you over an hour. The Vita version, I imagine, had the benefit of being able to be paused as you were getting off your train, and picked back up after dinner, or whatever, but here on PC, I imagine it might be a bit of a slog for some among you to sit there and play JUST the puzzle rhythm game for upwards of an hour. You can pause it and leave it, sure, but... I dunno, just a thought.

By the way, this game is making me have to define what a "rhythm game" really means. Does it mean you're performing inputs to the beat? Because this isn't that. There's a key game mechanic ATTACHED to the tempo of the song that is currently playing (that magic eraser cursor that slides from left to right), so one can argue that the music DOES have an effect on gameplay, but each song is more like a skin for the game than a brand new stage. I dunno. In my brain, you gotta be bobbing your head to each button push for it to count as a "real" rhythm game, but that's just me.

Anyway. Lumines is good simple fun. Fresh concepts are always great to find in puzzle games, and there's just enough interesting ideas here to make something special.

I bounced off of Puyo Puyo when I tried it on the Switch. The setups, the chains, the way you gotta stack things just so, so you can pull off a humongous combo and utterly break your opponent in two... It's beyond me. My game brain grew up with tetris. It built itself around tetris. We like simple, here. Lumines manages to fit itself very comfortably in the "simple" category. Make squares, don't let the board fill up, easy. And yet, that chain and stack that threw me off of Puyo makes an appearance here as well, with two key differences: there's only two colors (simple!) and more importantly, the blocks don't vanish right away. The magic eraser cursor is tied to the tempo of the song you're currently listening to, meaning you can stack up a massive shape of squares upon squares before they're actually removed, which then ALSO lets you plan out how the blocks above THOSE will fall and slot nicely next to the OTHER blocks, and oh my god, this game is really, REALLY good. My thumbs hurt typing this because of how much I've been abusing my D-pad trying to clear the time trials and CPU vs modes (which are both BS hard by the way, and the VS mode is a bit unbalanced by nature, but it's fine). Given its origins as a Vita game, this is very much an easy hop-in-for-a-while experience... Although, if you're going to try and clear the classic challenge, that's probably going to take you over an hour. The Vita version, I imagine, had the benefit of being able to be paused as you were getting off your train, and picked back up after dinner, or whatever, but here on PC, I imagine it might be a bit of a slog for some among you to sit there and play JUST the puzzle rhythm game for upwards of an hour. You can pause it and leave it, sure, but... I dunno, just a thought. By the way, this game is making me have to define what a "rhythm game" really means. Does it mean you're performing inputs to the beat? Because this isn't that. There's a key game mechanic ATTACHED to the tempo of the song that is currently playing (that magic eraser cursor that slides from left to right), so one can argue that the music DOES have an effect on gameplay, but each song is more like a skin for the game than a brand new stage. I dunno. In my brain, you gotta be bobbing your head to each button push for it to count as a "real" rhythm game, but that's just me. Anyway. Lumines is good simple fun. Fresh concepts are always great to find in puzzle games, and there's just enough interesting ideas here to make something special.