Tetris The Grand Master 4 – Absolute Eye

After just about 2 decades since the last installment, the hardest official Tetris game series got a new release on steam, and it’s pretty good.

For the longest time, the release of this game was something most joked about, while some were still clinging onto shards of hope for, but ultimately not something anyone could see happening anytime soon. That changed in December of 2022, when the first game in the series got released as a home version through an Arcade Archives port, making the series easily accessible for the first time to anyone outside of Japan. Half a year later in June 2023, the second game also saw a home release the exact same way, and people started believing in the future of the series again. Eventually, after a bit of cryptic hint-dropping by project lead Ichiro Mihara on Twitter, Tetris The Grand Master 4 was officially announced in December of 2024, and released the following April on Steam. The game was a bit dodgy at launch, missing quite a few vital things for a PC game like proper keyboard support, but development continued and the game received patches to make it play better within the week. And it’s pretty good now.

This is, of course, a Tetris The Grand Master game, so you should know what to be expecting when getting into this: Very Hard, Very Fast Tetris. But, I think this entry is arguably the best way to get into the series since the first game. The main reason why I say this is that you get to pick between the classic TGM ruleset the game has had since the start, or the modern ruleset that’s been a standard since 2001. The only other games in the series that let you do that are TGM3, the design of which seems entirely by antagonising the player, and TGM Ace, which is good in its own right but ultimately strays too far from the formula of the series to really feel like the original games. I do also bring up the first game though since it is still the most down to earth, no bullshit, “just stack good” game the series has.

TGM4 still mostly follows the TGM formula, with a couple changes. The available modes are:

• Your main graded mode (formerly “Master”, now “Normal”), only available in TGM rule, being replaced with the standard 150-line Marathon if you play on Standard rules instead. Plays very similar to the modes before it, expecting you to stack clean and fast, following a speedcurve similar to TGM2’s Master mode.
• Asuka, a mode that lays somewhat between Normal and the ridiculously hard modes, focusing on speed. You’re given a 7-minute time limit, and tasked to get as far as you can before it runs out. It starts you out already on max gravity, and as you get further you get less time to slide your pieces around. You do need to play somewhat clean, as either a Tetris or an All Clear is required to progress from one section to the next, but you do have an undo button to help with critical mistakes, at the cost of a slight time penalty.
• The aforementioned ridiculously hard mode, following in the evolution of T.A. Death and Shirase, called Master (a bit confusing for long time fans but possibly had to be done to unify the naming scheme of gamemodes in official games). Surprisingly, this mode focuses more on you playing clean than speeding through. Your number of Tetrises, T-Spin Doubles, and All Clears are kept track of, and you want to get as many as you can throughout, while the game periodically freezes line clears in the bottom half of your stack during the first 10 sections. After that, your pieces appear in random orientations for the rest of the game, and 3 sections later, another mechanic is introduced which is directly impacted by your stats up to that point: your pieces start freezing after being places and become indestructible, and your stats affect how long you have before they freeze. That’s as far as people have gotten at the time of writing, and there is rumors of this lasting for another 13 sections before one final challenge is thrown at the player.
  … So in short, a lot of bullshit. I’m not beating that.
• The puzzle-centric mode, Konoha. Unlike the previous puzzle mode Sakura, which tasked you with clearing specific blocks on a sequence of predefined stages, this one puts you on a board where all the blocks are double their regular size (effectively cutting the playfield size in half) and tasks you with achieving as many All Clears as you can. You are under a time limit, but you every All Clear within the first 10 sections refills this time limit. There’s two difficulty settings for this mode, with Easy mode taking away the squigly pieces and being complete after 110 All Clears, and Hard mode adding the squiglies back and reportedly ending at 150 All Clears. Also, you get anime girls. The anime girls are how you unlock blockskins to use in other modes.
• And finally, the CPU-VS mode, Shiranui. You climb a latter of 101 tiers, each pitting you against increasingly difficult CPU opponents. The first half isn’t so bad, but there is a huge difficulty spike at tier 60, as the CPU logic switches from “keep the stack down, difficulty = speed” to “I’ve been playing modern versus and know my openers and shit, difficulty = how often the bot misinputs”. There is also a special tier, put at tier 0, which isn’t part of this difficulty ladder and instead is trained on what you’ve been doing against the other bots. It seems possible to teach it just about whatever. Someone managed to teach it to top out in 2 seconds. I’m sure I could teach it to build an Among Us guy.

All in all, I think there’s a decent amount of stuff there for a wide range of skill levels. Asuka can act as a decent training tool for max gravity, and with the built-in training features I do think it can be possible to learn this style of high-speed survival Tetris through this. Konoha mode is also quite fun, and as someone who’s more drawn to puzzle modes where you need to improvise a quick solution to a situation, it’s where most of my playtime has been, and it’s been satisfying seeing myself get better and better with time. Price is definitely steep for what you get if you compare it to games like Tetris Effect for example, but if you like this sort of fast-paced arcade Tetris or want to get into it, I think it’s a game one can put enough time into to make it worth their while.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3328480 £29.50