Are you a fan of Tetris but haven’t played it multiplayer? No offence, but that’s like saying you love bacon but have only tried it raw. Whoever came up with the idea of a Tetris versus mode, wherein you’re rewarded for making lines with an avalanche of unhelpful junk blocks being poured into your opponents well, is a genius who’s presumably lost a lot of friends (according to the Tetris wiki, it was started by 1989’s Bloxxed, which means we’ve enjoyed over 30 years of this joy/pain).
It’s even more fun/relationship-destroying if you play a version that throws items into the mix, like the excellent DS version, inflicting hilariously unfair debuffs like reversed controls or not being able to rotate your tetriminos. Make sure you’re a safe distance away when you use the latter on a foe so they can’t rotate the long one that was going to win them the game, because they’ll likely be on the verge of whittling it into a shiv. I think Tetris Effect had to add that excellent co-op multiplayer mode just to counteract how close the versus version took us to another world war.
Anyway, I’m delighted to report that I’ve discovered a single-player game that captures the magic of versus Tetris. Flowstone Saga is a 2D RPG with lovely pixelart and the even lovelier idea of replacing the usual turn-based fisticuffs with… well, something the game never calls ‘Tetris’ for presumably boring legal reasons. You play as Mirai, an amnesiac protagonist (take a drink) living in a small island village (and again) who discovers a mysterious mystical artefact (slow down now) called the Flowstone, which possesses the power to make 2D RPG combat fun and interesting. Wow!
Now whenever Mirai walks into a monster, the game cuts to a Tetris well on the right and the beasts you’re battling on the left. These creatures have red bars underneath them that steadily fill up, and when they do, they’ll strike. Naturally, your only recourse is to aggressively play Tetris, with each line you clear acting as an attack. If Flowstone Saga just left it at that, it would just be a fun little mash-up of puzzler and RPG.
Instead, it almost immediately starts throwing in more ideas. Monsters can charge up devastating attacks, and to interrupt them, you have to get some hits in first. That means the ancient technique of steadily building a wall with a nice gap in it for the long tetromino so you can clear four rows at once isn’t going to work here. Often you’re also fighting two or more monsters simultaneously, so have to keep track of who you’re hitting while you’re trying to concentrate on clearing lines.
Tetrominos sometimes have little yellow diamonds on one of their squares. If you stick three of these diamonds together, you gain "heat" which makes your attacks more powerful. But naturally, sticking heat blocks together rarely involves putting them in a position where they can easily be cleared as lines. So now you’re not only avoiding creating four-line long opportunities, you’re also actively playing the ‘wrong’ way and creating future headaches for yourself. These are just the first two of many, many times that Flowstone Saga cleverly forces you to unlearn old Tetris habits and adapt to new, riskier ways of playing.
Just when I was finally adapting to focusing on making as many small lines as possible in quick succession, new enemies introduce ideas like shield blocks that give them high defence until I clear them, or making large sections of the well less effective to clear lines in, forcing me to pile up in the increasingly-likely-to-be-fatal optimal area. I can’t remember the last RPG when I was this excited to see what new common enemy the game would throw at me, purely because I want to see what fresh wrinkle they’ll add to the combat.
You unlock equippable frogs (er, of course), which grant abilities that change the combat dramatically. Like the Brigand, which throws in the occasional flaming tetromino that does persistent fire damage to enemies when cleared. Good stuff, but my favourite frog is the excellent risk-reward riot that is the Demolitionist. This one makes your lines do more damage the higher your tower is, urging you to gamble by playing near the top of the screen. It also lobs in 2x2 TNT blocks, almost always in the least helpful place possible (but if you clear them, it’ll destroy the bottom two rows, potentially saving you). I love this build, despite how many times it’s screwed me over and made me lose to even the most common enemies—which, of course, also makes every fight in the game more tense and exciting.
Besides, upon losing you can instantly just try again, and can even switch up your frog before doing so. This, along with your health refilling between battles and a super-speedy run button, often makes it feel like playing an RPG in fast-forward. Good thing too, because the narrative connecting all these excellent Tetris bouts together is admittedly pretty overfamiliar stuff. There’s lots of fun writing in here, but it’s a predictable tale that feels like it could be a template included with RPG maker.
Still, a slightly generic framework does help show off how well Impact Gameworks has successfully squeezed Tetris into ancient RPG tropes. Puzzles where you have to get past obstacles are fun little sequences where you have to figure out how to place a set series of tetrominoes to make a specific shape. And the way you gather resources is through a silly mini-game wherein a chum keeps throwing wood, rocks, etc, into your well and you have to make lines out of them to ‘collect’ them. It all makes about as much sense as a concrete parachute, but who cares?
I wish they’d gone even further with this everything-should-be-Tetris thinking. There’s a coffee shop where you can hang out with characters to learn more about them, Persona-style. A nice touch, with some of the game’s funnier writing, but I’d have loved them to have forced Tetris into this too. Like the chat getting more stuttered and forced the longer you take to clear lines. Or putting dire subjects like ‘POLITICS’ and ‘WHAT I DREAMT ABOUT LAST NIGHT’ in the well that you have to desperately clear before your conversation partner can bring them up.
Between Battle Royale Tetris 99 on Switch, and the audiovisual delights of Tetris Effect, fans of spinny block fun have been eating well lately. If you’re looking for another great riff on this puzzle classic, go check out Flowstone Saga on Steam immediately.
