The New Age Monsters of Tetris Effect: Connected
Every year around scary season, GwG offers a menagerie of thoughts on some of our favorite video game monsters. Now, boisterous beasts and creepy crawlies might not be the first things that come to mind when you think of Tetris, but give us a chance to convince you that there’s something frighteningly powerful lurking beneath the layers of abstraction in Tetris Effect.
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
When Tetris Effect became Tetris Effect: Connected, one of the multiplayer modes that it added was co-operative. In it, three players work together against a computer-controlled player. It’s Tetris with friends, humans lining up to face an AI antagonist. The rules are similar to some other competitive multiplayer modes: as players clear lines, they build up a shared meter that allows them to enter effect mode. This slows down the speed of gameplay and consolidates each player’s well into one wide one. Players take turns dropping pieces to clear lines. The larger the collective clear, the more garbage lines to be sent to the CPU’s well. The goal is to make the CPU top out, that is, to fill up their well such that they cannot play another piece. This is also known as Tetris Death.
There’s a cosmic theme to Tetris Effect. In the main game mode, Journey, players proceed through different themed levels with a goal for a certain number of line clears. Each level has its own procedural music and visual backgrounds that respond to gameplay and progress towards that goal. The final level, “Metamorphosis,” concludes in a shower of light that coalesces into the Earth’s sphere, moving into an image of a human figure seated in lotus position, accompanied by a final soundtrack of an infant’s giggle. It’s fairly typical new-age, transcendental imagery. At the end of your Tetris journey, you can always start anew.
In co-operative multiplayer, the screen orbits a dark polyhedron, surrounded by other particles. Each CPU is given a zodiac theme. They are the guardians of the stars, great, terrible, yet also predictable. Players face them together, out in the cosmos. And the cosmos wields weapons that we do not.
In Tetris Effect’s single-player Mystery mode, things can suddenly appear up close and personal. Especially in VR.
As players progress in the co-op mode, the CPU acquires an expanding arsenal of moves that are borrowed from Mystery, one of Tetris Effect’s solo modes. As the CPU fills its meter, it can throw a range of obstacles in players’ way. Some are fairly traditional attacks for Tetris multiplayer, bumping up rows of garbage lines into players’ wells or increasing the drop speed. Others are curveballs: squeezing the range of the well into smaller playable areas that move as pieces are dropped, hiding the playing field, or transforming the usual tetrominos into unusual combinations of three or five blocks. Each member of the zodiac wields a different set of these powers. While all can bump pieces up, stop a player from holding pieces, and spin sections of the playfield, Sagittarius has lasers that can slice holes through a carefully constructed stack. Virgo can prevent players from spinning pieces. Some can hit with multiple attacks at once; Aquarius, one of the last bosses in the mode, might hit players with a squeeze of the well’s size and broken tetrominos that are missing blocks at the same time, if you’re unlucky.
Tetris is a relatively dry game, and in most iterations it thrives more on feeling, patterns, points, speed, and play than characters or story. But when Tetris takes on a more interactive element, as it has in multiplayer iterations, designers seem drawn to put faces to CPUs. In Tetris Effect, the zodiac plays this role right up to the final boss. As antagonists, they remain removed and abstract. Is there character to them, or do they merely suit the game’s starry aesthetic?
One element of this is easier to see as a spectator. It’s the element that sits behind the colorful particles and the black hole in the background. Really, it’s the background of this game and most videogames: the logic of the CPU, displayed in unhurried ways on screen. Take a look at this clip of three players challenging the final boss. Focus on the well on the right, which belongs to the final boss, Tetrimidion. If you’ve ever looked at a guide to the nouveau-Tetris mechanic of t-spinning, which awards bonus points and meter for rotating the T-tetromino somewhat impossibly around notches in the stack, you can see it manifested here in the CPU’s movements. It doesn’t just spin T-tetrominoes, though: it also spins L-, S-, and Z-tetrominoes with ease. In some ways, it does this in an uncanny way. Often, it spins these shapes casually and without need. When Tetrimidion executes a T-spin, it always does so as though it’s doing a setup for a T-Spin triple, even if it is clearing a single line. The rhythm is unbending, without the pauses or flurries of drops that are common to human players. In the clip linked above, you can spot the differences between the three humans on the left and the Tetrimidion CPU on the right.
Tetrimidion battles two humans and an allied CPU. Its well is a third full, but it’s halfway to charging an attack.
Some of the earlier zodiac signs were deliberately programmed to be more mistake-prone, to be slower, to stumble. But Tetrimidion doesn’t play that way. Nor does it play with ultimate, terminator-like precision and speed. Like many games (Chess and, more recently, Go/Baduk/Weiqi), Tetris in its current ruleset is a game in which computers are superior to human competitors. A CPU could, for all practical, computational purposes, play an infinite game. And so, in general, we don’t compete with that kind of CPU. Instead, when developers create competitive versions of Tetris, CPUs are programmed with flaws. In a way, this reflects the zodiac: deterministic in some respects, vague in others. In Tetrimidion, that vagueness appears almost like idiosyncratic movements. A very flashy player might execute back-to-back Z-spins, but those don’t efficiently result in the same points and rise in meter as T-spins would in Tetris Effect: Connected. It is possible to spin these pieces, but unless one is in very particular circumstances it makes little practical sense to do so.
Of course, people aren’t limited by what is practical in their play, as you can see in this clip (watch the well on the left). Maybe the Tetrimidion CPU is merely the way for the programmers of Tetris Effect: Connected to show off. It’s a CPU that’s excessive and stylish, even when no one is likely to be looking.
The Earth from space, mostly in darkness with spots of light representing urban lights, pins for active players, and a small cloud of starry, orbiting avatars.
Back when Tetris Effect was just that, before it added the multiplayer modes of Connected, players could cooperate asynchronously during weekly events. These would take the scores that players accumulated from playing certain single-player modes and add them together. With enough points, which were often rapidly posted before the weekend even began in North America, everyone would win. This cooperation was set against a background of our spherical world in space, with people’s starry avatars swooping around it. Players even have the option to shove the game’s menus aside and just watch people’s avatars move gently around the world.
The inscrutable, illuminated Tetrimidion.
In Connected’s synchronous co-op mode, the background is a darkened polyhedron set against a black hole. Fighting Tetrimidion reveals that shape to be the final boss, with bright streaks of light against an event horizon illuminating the background. What did we find out in the cosmos? Recognizable constellations, governors of destiny. After them, one last, more powerful entity that is all about stylish Tetris. A grandiose final obstacle. It sits just outside the range of one of the most powerful astronomical objects in our awareness. It wants to play Tetris. Ultimately, it even wants you to win. But first, it’s going to toy with you.
For more creature features, read Christian Haines on the rats of the Plague Tale series, Nate Schmidt on the creepers of Minecraft, and Edcel Gonzalez on the ecodisasters of Super Mario: Sunshine.
