As I left the Denver International Airport for the umpteenth time after another concert at the world-famous Red Rocks Amphitheater, what I was going to talk about in this review for Lumines Arise remained loud at the forefront of my mind. There are many, many things to talk about with this game, and if you give me the time, I can and will talk about it for hours on end. Not everything I say will be coherent sentences, mind you, but I will yap as long as you allow me to.
My best friend Adam has synesthesia, which Wikipedia defines as “a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” For example, people’s voices for him have colors. Another friend of mine who has it describes her pain in shapes, because it’s the only way she can.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s style, starting with Rez, the goal was to create a video game experience that emulates the sensation of synesthesia by mixing visuals, music, and haptic feedback. Adam’s first experience with an Enhance game was Tetris Effect on PlayStation 4 with PSVR. It was an emotional, mind-blowing experience for him, and it was really cool—as someone who has been a fan of Mizuguchi’s work for years—to hear what a person who actually has synesthesia experienced and felt about the game.
A puzzler with a purpose
Once I published my preview, I told him about it, making sure it was on his radar for the November release. We were on the phone last night while I was driving home from the airport, and he had asked me about it. I told him flat out: Tetris Effect and Humanity walked so Lumines Arise could run.
The thing that impresses me the most about Lumines Arise is its soundtrack. I will get side-eyed and chastised for this (and quite frankly, I do not care), but the Lumines Arise soundtrack is the most important soundtrack of this generation. Hydelic and Takako Ishida really cooked with this one. To go back to what I opened with: This soundtrack needs to be performed live. I require a Red Rocks Lumines Arise set for survival. If I can’t get that, give me a Coachella one, at least. I want to dance under the stars with a bunch of people screaming at the top of my lungs: We’re touching skin to skin, the bodies that we’re in, we’re feeling everything, we’re only human!
Each stage is four songs (it goes up to five at a certain point), allowing for seamless transitions and truly immersing the player into the music and stages. While the stages in Tetris Effect were similarly structured, I don’t feel they told a story the same way they do here in Lumines Arise. The Tetris Effect soundtrack is still a 10/10 in my book, but the foundation and structure of Arise is much stronger.
A colorful, visual journey
This could be because of the massive overhaul in graphics and how the background is used in gameplay. In Tetris Effect, the background was complementary to the music and the squares. This was most likely by design, as Tetris requires a lot of concentration on each individual block as they drop, requiring the player to act quickly on their feet to strategically place each uniquely shaped tetromino.
Lumines still requires the player to focus on matching things up, but you’re dealing with making as many matching 2×2 squares as possible out of 2×2 squares made of two different colors or patterns. I could be way off base here, but I feel like the type of concentration differs, which allows you to be able to focus on the various layers of graphical excitement.
Backgrounds now seamlessly interact with the playboard, as well as with the music. Blocks sometimes pulse to the music. Or one shape may swirl to the song’s vocals, while the other beats to the song’s bass. The pieces and background work together with the music, constantly sucking you into a visual storytelling experience. Your customizable avatar is always coming along for the ride too, moving its little body to the music on the lower right-hand side of the screen.
In my preview published last month, I went over the basics of the game’s mechanics and accessibility features Enhance has added to make Lumines Arise more approachable and accessible to a much wider audience than before. What they’ve also accomplished is taking a once very niche franchise and making it appealing to a much wider audience. They’ve accomplished this through an absolutely phenomenal soundtrack, online multiplayer, and other community features. Tetris Effect did an outstanding job of hitting many different genres of EDM music, but Lumines Arise takes it up another notch.
A really cool feature added for Arise is the Playlists feature. With Playlists, you can make up to ten playlists of up to twelve tracks (with the first two being six and eight tracks respectively) of whatever Arise songs/stages you want, in any order. You can then play through these on any difficulty, or have the computer play them in a “theater” mode. My only gripe with this is that the computer is very, very good at Lumines and plays through levels too quickly. You don’t really get to enjoy the songs and stages too much this way.
Lumines Arise’s soundtrack is more than just sound
For me, Lumines Arise is always going to come back to the music. I have never truly felt so much with a soundtrack before. If you can use headphones, this is a game best played using them. I can confirm that a car stereo at high volumes is a great way to experience the soundtrack (the two tracks that have been released prior to the game’s release have been played on repeat on Tidal since publishing the preview). When the full soundtrack becomes available on streaming services, presumably upon release, I pray for the vehicles in my garage. Specifically, my husband’s car, because as a car person, some of these songs ignite some sort of primal instinct to hit the open road.
Every single stage evokes a different feeling and memory. Some multiple emotions, and multiple memories. “Chameleon Groove” is just an absolute banger, without question—it pumps me up and makes me feel like I can conquer anything. “Sunset Beach” takes me back through a lot of really tough times in my life and how I picked myself up and got through them. “Star Odyssey” reminds me a lot of the beginning of my relationship with my husband, especially when we were long-distance. The last song moved me to tears—it’s perfectly executed. I’ll just leave it at that.
A masterpiece—hang it in The Met
Lumines, at its core, is a great game. But the music always made this franchise. It has always been accompanied by excellent music, but with a title like Lumines Arise, we are essentially witnessing the rebirth of the franchise. It’s beautiful, it’s challenging yet embracing, and it encourages you to share it with others. It truly is a labor of love. It is the result of Enhance and Monstars’ evolution across the last couple of console generations. Taking the success from past releases and putting that into a franchise that, after a successful remaster, needed a revival.
If the last 1,200 words haven’t made it obvious, Lumines Arise is phenomenal. It’s the perfect puzzler. It’s an immersive experience that you’ll get so much out of for $39.99 USD ($44.99 USD for the Deluxe Edition). Outside of my minor issue with the theater mode in Playlists, I really can’t find anything wrong with it. I think about it constantly, and I’m looking forward to hearing about everyone’s experiences with it, both Lumines veterans and newcomers alike.
Enhance, Monstars, if you’re reading this, I have but one request: Complete the trifecta. Go full circle. Bring back Every Extend Extra.
This review was done with a PC product key provided by Enhance.
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