"Lumines Arise" has one problem: it's not "Tetris Effect"
The new audio-visual puzzle game from Enhance is another sensory experience that can't quite reach the same heights
Tetris Effect, the 2018 masterpiece from Enhance Games, brilliantly escalated the puzzle game to its crescendo. Its mix of throbbing electro-pop and psychadelic visuals turned the classic into an overwhelming sensory experience that could put you into a flow unlike anything else.
But if there was something could contend with the kind of surrender-yourself-to-it trance of Tetris Effect, it would be Lumines. First released on the Playstation Portable back in 2004, Lumines was a clever variation on the Tetris block-clearing formula, introducing a unique presentation style (w/ an emphasis on music), one it iterated on and evenually mastered with Tetris Effect.
Lumines Arise, then, arrives as a natural culmination of Enhance’s brief but storied history of marrying puzzle mechanics with rythmic, club-like atmosphere. In it, the player will find all of Enhance’s visual and aural trademarks: intense electro-industrial music with the occasional pop hook, and hallucinogenic imagery that dances and bobs at the screen’s edges and backgrounds.
What’s happening in the foreground, what the gameplay actually consists of, is where Lumines Arise shows its limitations.
As a new player to the Lumines series, I have struggled thus far (10 hours in) to fall into that zen-like state that is so easy to do in Tetris Effect. Here, you must rotate and drop every combination of 2x2 shapes (each with two competing tiles), matching as many squares as possible before the board fills up. In Tetris, the visual shape of what’s missing and which piece you need can become second nature or instinctual. In Lumines, I am constantly having to break from my focus in order to read the board in front of me, rather than allowing my instincts or feelings to take over.
This added layer of “work” or visual noise keeps Lumines Arise from greatness. Enhance are experts at these kind of A/V experiences, and despite some echoes of their best work, Arise can only muster the memories of their past games, instead of forging a new one.
Valve announces new hardware, which could drastically alter the console landscape
Valve, otherwise known as Steam (the name of their world-dominating PC digital storefront), announced a new hardware ecosystem last Thursday, including a controller, VR headset and home console, to go with its already available handheld, the Steam Deck.
Named the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller, collectively, the new hardware ecosystem (launching sometime in 2026) is a clear, bold declaration of Valve’s broader intentions: removing the barrier to entry for millions of casual gamers who want the turnkey approach to gaming that consoles like the PS5 and Xbox can afford, and that until now, the PC ecosystem has tended to neglect.
The Steam Machine, its cube-shaped PC-console hybrid, is Valve’s attempt to do just that – a coup to bring its monolithic digital storefront to a wider, more casual base, who can tap into the vast PC gaming landscape for a fraction of the cost of a $1,500-$2,000 gaming rig.
Of course, cost is the real question mark here, and with Valve stating their intention pretty clearly (and similarly pricing their Steam Deck at a very competitive level relative to the handheld PC market), one can assume that its yet-to-be-unveiled price tag will rival those of the $650 Xbox Series X and $750 PS5 Pro.
The long-term prognosis could be lethal (or at least highly damaging) to Microsoft’s Xbox division. After shifting their strategy for several years now to target PC gamers (and not just console gamers), the Xbox now loses its one major advantage in going after that market: accessibility.
As Polygon put it last week, Xbox is screwed.
The Running Man goes in circles
Returning to both a more practical style of action filmmaking and Stephen King’s original novel (opposed to the loose Arnold Schwarzenegger 1987 adaptation), 2025’s The Running Man ends up being an unwieldy fit for director Edgar Wright’s sensibilities - too angry to be funny and too obvious to be satirical.
The movie begins strongly, with Wright immediately introducing us to this future world that is alarmingly not too dissimilar from our own. (As Allison Wilmore at Vulture has pointed out, the 1982 King novel takes place in the “future” of 2025, making this “present day” version almost too little, too late). As we see early on, the upper and lower classes live in segregated parts of the city, human labor is completely devalued, and the world’s information is controlled by the “network”, who distort and manufacture the truth, especially in their “deathsport”-style Amazing Race show.
There are loads of very obvious parallels to our current administration in The Running Man, and almost none of them feel comfortable in the hands of Wright. It’s obvious that he empathizes with the forces attempting to rise against the fascist television network hosts and their militarized police state, but too often the movie devolves into didactic conversations about class, sick children, or the convoluted events of the plot.
Case in point is an early third act scene in which Glen Powell finds himself riding shotgun to an upper middle class woman played by Emilia Jones. The two, on opposite ends of the social pecking order, practically scream to each other the morals of the movie at the precise moment where the film falls off a cliff. Powell, for his part, is doing his best to clench through these trickier pitfalls in the script, but his performance can only do so much. At the end of the day, The Running Man is angry and tempermental, and then it just ends.
Arc Raiders is a massive success in spite of its A.I. controversies
Less than two weeks after release, Arc Raiders has sold over 4 million copies across all platforms, with a concurrent player count of over 700,000 at one point last weekend.
The extraction shooter’s success and acclaim, combined with my own appreciation for it, has not been without controversy, however, as the game’s use of A.I. to aid in development has rightfully drawn criticism. Eurogamer’s Rick Lane took the game to task in his review for its use of A.I. voice lines trained on real actors.
Unsurprisingly, in response to the criticism, two CEO’s (who stand to benefit from its cost-saving potential) reacted very foolishly. First up was Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney who responded by saying: “political opinions should go into op eds folks”. This was then followed up by Nexon (publisher of Arc Raiders) CEO Junghun Lee saying, “I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI.” A fact that is simply not true.
The Clickaround
🎮 Protests continue over Rockstar’s firing of 31 employees who were attempting to
unionize. 220 current employees have now signed an open letter demanding that their colleagues be “immediately reinstated”. (Video Games Chronicle)
🎮 Football Manager 26 launched with UX so bad, it has over 5,000 mostly negative reviews on Steam, with the majority slamming its user experience. (This Week in Video Games)
🎮 One of the most notorious video game flops of all time, Concord, has returned from the dead thanks to a group of modders, who managed to play a match on a private server. The multiplayer shooter was taken offline by Playstation last year just two weeks after its release. (The Game Post)
🎮 Ubisoft postponed their latest earnings call, certainly a rare and ominous sign for the struggling publisher. (Video Games Chronicle)
🎬 Sinners director Ryan Coogler confirmed that his next movie will be Black Panther 3, another example of a wildly successful director pivoting back to IP after an original idea. (Deadline)
🎬 As seen in Predator: Badlands, the franchise has evolved over its nearly 40-year run. Jesse Hassenger writes about the Predator movies and their ability to adapt and remain relevant. (AV Club)