[STEAM] Lumines Arise review: Tetris Effect follow-up is an audio-visual delight

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How do you follow up the ‘Perfect Game’? The answer, probably, is that you can’t. Not on its own terms, anyway. So instead, Lumines Arise, the next music game from Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Enhance, breaks the rules and does some of the things the phenomenal Tetris Effect couldn’t.

The result is a loud and brash, if somewhat unrefined, synaesthesia puzzler that’s more visually stunning and dynamic than its predecessor, often blurring the lines between gameplay and audio-visual experience in fantastic ways. However, it often does so at the expense of gameplay clarity, and with a soundtrack that, overall, features fewer memorable highs, and far less of the playful tension that made Tetris Effect so brilliant.

Overall, Arise feels like the experimental album, the Kid A to Tetris Effect’s OK Computer. And, ultimately, by following a peerless titan of pop culture with something a bit different, Enhance has created a music puzzle game that complements the game it follows, even if its stacked bricks don’t quite reach as high.

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