The best short game in the catalog
Tetris Effect, what was left to invent in Tetris
- Critic score
- 90
- Player rating
- 4.5/5
- Main story
- 3.3 h
- Genre
- Puzzle, Casual
Tetris came out in 1984 and had, in principle, nothing left to prove. This one still finds something to add, and holds one of the highest scores in the catalog.
The game comes from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who also made Rez and Lumines — titles built on the same obsession: making image and sound answer the player's input, until playing feels like playing music.
Here, every rotation of a piece produces a note. Every completed line advances a track. The scene behind the grid reacts, transforms, changes theme as you progress — a seabed, a desert, a field of stars. The mechanical loop of Tetris is untouched; it is the sensory envelope that has been entirely rebuilt.
The mechanical addition is called the Zone: a reserve that, once triggered, stops time and lets you stack pieces onto already completed lines before clearing them all at once. It is both a safety net when the grid fills up and a scoring tool for those who master it. Used well, it reverses a lost game.
The Connected in the title refers to the multiplayer expansion: a cooperative mode where three players share a single grid against an opponent controlled by the game, plus competitive modes online and local. Cooperation on a shared grid is something Tetris had never explored.
Three hours will take you through Journey mode. It is the kind of game you keep installed for months, for twenty minutes in the evening — and the reason you should not judge a game by its length.