Tetrachroma

If you’re ever feeling bored of standard Tetris and want a game that adds interesting ideas while feeling like a complete polished product and not a haphazardly thrown together unity project, definitely give this Tetris-Meets-Reversi game a go.

So picture this. I’m an avid Tetris player, as you may know from me literally making some sometimes. I open my Twitter feed and while scrolling through the usual outrageous hellfire and cute pictures of bunnies I usually get from there I see a post pop up that’s a trailer for an upcoming game. It’s a Tetris fangame with a new colour mechanic added on top. Sounds neat, but some very peculiar details catch my eye and show me that this guy knows more about Tetris than the average guy who’s only familiar with the general concept of Tetris without playing any of the games. The two specific things that spoke to me were a quick showcase of infinite gravity (pieces falling to the bottom of your stack instantly) and big mode (pieces are twice as big). Those two details  – especially the first one – show that the developer was aware of high-speed Tetris games such as Tetris: The Grand Master, meaning the game would probably allow for a pretty high skill ceiling. The demo then dropped, and when I got to play it I loved it immediately.

The way the game plays is like Tetris, but blocks come in different colours and those colours matter. When your piece gets added to your stack, each edge that touches the stack will spread the colour of the piece in that direction until it meets the same colour; similar to Reversi/Othello where you capture tokens by sandwiching them between tokens of your colour. The thing that makes this colour mechanic matter is very simple: lines will not clear until they are full of one solid colour. If this was a lot of confusing words, here’s a visual of how that looks like in like 10 seconds:

You might be wondering how much this changes to the base formula of Tetris. The answer is, it changes enough that just relying on Tetris skills is not nearly enough. Sure, a lot of skill about proper stacking habits do transfer over, but they do come with the asterisk of the colour mechanic changing up the dynamic drastically enough that you have to adapt a lot of these things. For an example of something that’s easy to notice but harder to internalise, the order in which you place pieces matters, since now placing two pieces in a different order may lead to different colour patterns being made. It is learnable though, and when it clicks it’s really satisfying to get better at it. The mechanic is deep enough to allow for things that don’t happen in regular Tetris – try to clear 15 lines in a single piece placement on purpose if you want to test your understanding of the game – and thus I would say a higher skill ceiling, or at least different skills than just playing the game faster.

Despite all this though, the game does make a surprisingly good effort to accomodate for Tetris players of all skill levels. Each game mode has 6 speed difficulty levels, ranging from peaceful where you can take your time because pieces won’t fall or lock on the stack until you press the drop button yourself, all the way to death which is infinite gravity all the way through. And aside from master and death difficulties being locked behind a clear in hard diffculty, and a whopping four out of 58 achievements, nothing is locked behind speed levels or any kind of fancy skill beyond surviving the game mode until the end. The game is perfectly fine giving you 54 achievements and all the available cosmetic customisation options by just beating every mode it has to offer on the lowest difficulty, which I think is a huge thing to let people who aren’t Tetris nerds like me appreciate the game.
If you’re curious, the other achievements are for big line clears, and a speedrun achievement for any marathon mode.

I haven’t even mentioned what the game modes actually are yet. The game has three main game types:

• Spectrum, in which you pick the amount of different colours you want to have in play and ends at 100 lines;
• Marathon, which is essentially all four stages of Spectrum in a row, for a total of 400 lines (almost 3 times as long as a modern Tetris game marathon so you’ll be here a while);
• and Puzzle, which is a series of 40 boards in which you are tasked to clear specific lines, some board requiring you think about how the colour mechanic works to solve in the par amount of pieces.

That’s all there is to it for Puzzle, but for Spectrum and Marathon, you can then choose one of eight game modes:

• Standard, the default mode, with all the quality of life upgrades that you may be used to Tetris having for the past couple decades;
• Wild, which is slightly easier as wild card blocks are added to the game, which count as any colour and let you clear lines easier;
• Chaos, unlocked by clearing Wild, which adds a silly mechanic which make your stack a lot harder to keep clean (no spoilers but it’s true to its name);
• Instant, which is the same as Standard but with all the delays from animations removed, good for people who want to play fast;
• Arcade, which plays similar to the aforementioned Tetris: The Grand Master games, down to the rules on how pieces rotate (which is neat attention to detail);
• Console, which plays like classic NES Tetris and is therefore de-facto the hardest game mode of them all for all the wrong reasons;
• Big, which as mentioned at the start makes your pieces twice as large, making you effectively play Standard in a 5-wide 10-tall board;
• and Cell, unlocked by clearing Big, which puts you on an 8-by-8 square board and will really test how well you can use your space (this one is my favourite).

You then pick your speed difficulty – from easiest to hardest: Peaceful, Easy, Normal, Hard, Master, and Death – and off you go to place some blocks. You can also choose to play any of these combinations on endless mode if you really wanna place a lot of blocks. Another neat thing that this game does, it does have standard Tetris in it, as the Spectrum game type cheekily has a “monochrome” section where you can play any mode without the colour mechanic, aside from Wild and Chaos since those are based on the colour mechanic and would just be copies of Standard otherwise. This means if you play Spectrum/Monochrome/Standard, you’re pretty much playing an implementation of modern Tetris.

This game is a lot of fun. There is quite a lot to keep you busy in there, and if you’re a completionist you will want to give everything a try as each mode combination gives you an achievement for clearing it. This game came out proper only two weeks ago and I’ve already sank double-digit hours in it and completed it, but it’s such fun game that I will keep playing it even after that, because I can still do more in the game, and the amount of polish that went in it, especially in the visuals department, make it genuinely super fun to play. I still need to figure out how to clear a whole lot of lines at once on purpose, after all.

And the best part? It’s only a fiver on Steam. Outrageous amount of content and polish for that price. As one of the reviews put it: “criminal that this is the same price as a subway sandwich” – klevmeister

In short, very good spin on the formula that makes Tetris feel fresh again and has a stupid amount of content and polish for it’s asking price. Absolute bargain if you’re into this sort of games.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2702490 £4.29