The Profoundly Moving Tetris Effect

(CW: depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety)

It's hard to describe Tetris Effect. On the surface, it's simple: a Tetris game with enticing music and visuals made by Tetsuya Mizuguchi.  Everything going on in the background changes depending on your actions. Each level has a different theme which connects the music to the aesthetics, and different player actions prompt visual and auditory cues. Turning a block triggers a specific sound that dances with the music playing in the background, and clearing a line causes the visuals to pulse in a way that you don't even really notice all the time. But that's just the surface because there's so much more going on here than meets the eye.

Most likely, those visual and musical cues will be the first giveaway that this game is bigger than your average Tetris reskin. Tetris Effect has an extraordinarily specific visual and musical style, one that feels reminiscent of Mizuguchi's other games without ripping them off. Each level integrates the songs and aesthetic seamlessly with the playspace, incorporating more complicated ideas slowly as you get used to the controls and pace.

But Tetris Effect also has a core theme of development. Throughout each level, the music slowly builds over time from simple key components into a complex crescendo of huge orchestrations. Every song builds differently, incorporating various elements depending on the themes of the level. Downtown Jazz, for example, features ambient city noises and a neon skyline behind the Tetris playing field. Every time you turn a block, a short burst of piano keys plays which gives a jazzy, improvised feel to the level. Sending a block down (as opposed to letting it fall) leads to a nice, consistent piano hit that melds well with the sting from earlier. Together, these create an arrhythmic atmosphere, and as a more consistent background track kicks in, this atmosphere feels distinctly metropolitan. As you progress, the speed begins to change, and the city wakes up, mimicking the structure of a typical New York City day. The whole experience builds to this impressive drum crescendo, sending you flying into the next stage with a sense of joyous fulfillment.

Levels like these manage to generate an intense nostalgia. Hearing the sounds and seeing the sights of a sleeping metropolis that wakes up as you play incited a visceral reaction in me. There's another level, set in a forest that also impacted me deeply. It starts with nice soft sounds of rain, and every time you throw a block down, the sound of crunching snow plays. I had absolutely no idea how powerful this would be until I played it and was hit with a flurry of memories in the snow. When I was around 7 and had a snowball fight with my brother on a ski trip. When I was walking around New York after the first snow my freshman year, finally realizing just how far from home I was. When I walked through a blizzard in New Jersey from the train station to my then-girlfriend's house. I didn't even realize these were all fond memories until they hit me like snowflakes in a storm, each one a unique combination of feelings. This nostalgia hit me harder because of how well the game emphasizes a slow development. The game builds to these intense moments of near sensory overload that triggered deep memories within me. This was a common thread throughout my playthrough, with multiple levels inciting some sort of memory I associated with the sights and sounds.

The theme of development does even more work though, permeating every aspect of playing the game through subtle and interesting level design. Before I started playing Tetris Effect, I thought I was pretty good at Tetris. Turns out, I wasn’t playing Tetris the way it was meant to be played: I was playing Tetris Battle (the Facebook game), which encouraged the wrong habits through competition. Playing Tetris Effect cured me of those patterns. Each level has a different progression of speeds at which the tetrominoes fall. My favorite levels were the ones that started slow, sped up, and then slowed down again. After the initial speed jump, you're used to thinking and playing faster, so when the speed slows down again, you still play fast. This subtle design choice actually taught me to be more confident as I played and helped me get better at the game by giving me a chance to breathe. The developers manage to do so much with what appears to be so little.

In fact, they do more than I ever could’ve expected out of a Tetris game. As a game, Tetris forces you to live with your mistakes. Plenty of games punish you for them, but when you're playing Tetris, you have to stare every error down. Misplaced that L block? You're going to be looking at it for a while, and you'll have to play around it if you want to keep going. The game constantly builds on itself, since that’s the core gameplay loop. Those mistakes will stack and taunt you as you stare at the empty space created by a square you put in the wrong place. Tetris also teaches you that you can fix your miscalculations. Not by deleting or ignoring them, but by facing them head on and figuring out how to make things work using the mistakes you made. Very few slip-ups are actually game ending and those that are can still just be lessons on how to improve. You have to develop as a player to figure out how to fix those problems, an apt metaphor for life in general.

Tetris Effect actually has a lot to say about life, more than you would think. I've struggled with various mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety. I realize that this may be a strange turn, but hear me out - this is critical to really understand how much of an impact this game has had on me in such a short time. I also want to make it clear, that I'm not actively suicidal right now - it's not something I think about on a daily basis, and I really am not a danger to myself or others.

Still, there are a lot of moments that are really hard to get through. Some moments where I have the fleeting thought of how much easier it might be to just not have to deal with anything anymore. These thoughts never last more than a handful of milliseconds, but they still buzz in and out of my head. There are plenty of times where, for a split second, it seems easier to give up than to continue trying.

And I had similar feelings while playing Tetris Effect. Sometimes when I misplaced a block, I would feel this temptation to just spam blocks down and restart. To quit. It had to be easier to quit than to try and fix that placement. Right? At first, it was. There were a couple of times where I did give up. It was easier than trying to fix problems and risk failing. But a crazy thing happened: the further I got, the more I realized that I didn’t have to give up. That I had the power to help myself. That I could fight back and power through, a central component of every Tetris game. I was building as a player, constantly improving. Each level threw something somewhat new at me, and I began to take it in stride. Misplaced that L block? That’s okay, I’ll just clear the lines around it and move on. I don’t have to quit.

Through layered development, Tetris Effect taught me how to persevere both in the game and in real life. Making mistakes is intensely scary, but it’s also a key part of life and of Tetris, a game where you rise to the level of your own mediocrity. There are no external forces preventing you from succeeding - just your own ability to place blocks. Tetris Effect took this simple premise and added depth to it, which took me on an emotional journey throughout the game. Mizuguchi took me to places I didn’t know a Tetris game could take me, helping me realize some deep, fundamental truths about myself. One of the songs has the lyric, "We embark on this ride to find out who we are." Tetris Effect taught me more about who I am than almost any other game I've played in 2018, and I'm so glad I embarked on this ride.