Opinion: The Best Games of the Generation!

#6 — Tetris Effect

Tetris is one of the best selling games of all time – and for good reason. The simplistic concept of the game, combined with the responsive and addicting gameplay makes for a formula that is in many ways timeless. Since the initial release of the game back in 1984, the formula has stayed mostly the same, to the benefit of the game. Some may call Tetris the perfect game – and so don’t fix what isn’t broken.

That being said, What Enhance Games and Tetsuya Mizuguchi managed to achieve was to inject emotion into a game about fitting shapes together. This wasn’t done by creating a traditional story featuring characters and dialogue, but through the synergy of music, visuals, and gameplay.

Video games are the best medium for art currently in existence. I truly believe this. The reason why I am making such a claim is simple: video games take all the other mediums, combines them together, and then adds another layer on top: Interactivity. This extra layer gives video games the potential to affect its consumer in a way that other mediums cannot. This is what Tetris Effect does.

Tetris Effect takes music produced by Hydellic, sung beautifully by the likes of Kate Brady and Mechi Pieretti, combines it with visuals that not only sync up with the emotion of the song itself, but evolves as the player places Tetrominos onto the board, and of course, features that timeless gameplay that Tetris is known for. All of these combine to move the player through a journey of emotion with the use of visuals, audio, and gameplay – without needing to say a single word.

Over the past 35 years there have been dozens and perhaps even hundreds of Tetris games and variants created and released, both officially and unofficially. Though thought to be impossible, Tetris Effect somehow managed to take what is considered to be a perfect game, and made it even better.

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