gAmeDHD

Colin Clark

My eyes are so bleary I can barely see the screen as I write this and my thumbs creak and pop every time I hit the space bar. I just spent the last 9 hours playing Lumines Arise on my arguably too-big living room television screen. I vibed away the day absolutely soaking in immaculate tunes and visuals and at times found myself almost uncomfortably locked in. Now that I’m away from the screen, the last full-work-day’s-worth of Lumines is an absolute blur, except the final hour and a half which I spent in a personal spiral on the precipice of a panic attack. I had to get out of the house.

It’s not that Lumines is unpleasant in itself. Quite the opposite. It dares you to stick to your self-promise of “one more run” as it gleefully sucks you back in for another go. And there goes another 20 minutes. Or shorter, as I’m terrible at Lumines. However, after bashing and fumbling my way through Journey, the game’s campaign mode and filling out about 35 of the game’s mission or puzzle mode levels I learned I could set my preferences so that the two by two blocks didn’t automatically drop. I thought this the perfect opportunity to begin to truly learn the game, practice seeing the parity of the blocks – where they eventually would end up after placing them offset on another block – and see how far I could get without bloating the screen to a failure state. I just wanted to vibe, dude. I did not “just vibe”… dude.

Lumines Arise‘s message of “reaching out” and experiencing life in all it’s splendor, shared with the people around us, is a bit dichotomous to developer Enhance’s 2014 release, Tetris Effect, which examines inner relationships with self and mind. I’ll admit, the two have very different feels to them. At a quick glance you wouldn’t notice, but if you’ve played both to any extent I’m sure you’ll agree. They have different theses entirely. You just have to dig for them. Lumines Arise celebrates interpersonal relationships, romance, and the togetherness of the human spirit where Tetris Effect asks that you look inward and grow. They are products of their time, eleven years separated. Yet both are valid, and both are violently and demandingly humanist works, drawing from the likes of Protagoras and Petrarch. A two thousand year old lineage of progressive thought and belief in the human spirit, as well as our power to shape our world.

With these thoughts, critiques, and comparisons beginning to form in my mind, I dropped into a Survival Journey on Relaxed Mode 1, which asks that you play every stage in order with a square-clear-count metric moving you from one to the next. Relaxed Mode 1 halts the blocks at the top of the screen. They don’t fall until you tell them to. However, the novice – see: me – can still top out their screen fairly easily with a handful of misplaced plays. I spun and dropped and matched and popped to my hearts content, just enjoying the spectacle. What happened next, I was entirely unprepared for.

My session – which ended two hours and fifty seven minutes later with me in tears – began peacefully enough. The opening tracks are absolute bops and I easily relaxed into the comfort of having time to suss out where I wanted my blocks to fit, drop, and stack. Soon enough, my brain became more and more accustomed to the mechanics of the sliding and falling pieces. I got quicker and quicker at deciding where to drop and by the time my stage level was in the double digits I had entered a flow state I’ve never experienced to any great extent in gaming. I’ve heard it described an infinite number of times throughout my time in the gaming scene. You hear about it from pro Tetris players who say their brain just turns off everything else besides what needs to be done so that placing the tetronimoes becomes automatic and even subconscious. You hear about it from fighting game players. Some claim that it often feels like they can read their opponent’s next action even before said opponent knows what they themself are going to do. They’re so locked in, it’s as if they can read the future. I hadn’t realized it was happening while it was happening, but out of nowhere I just began making great plays, one after another. I was consistently scoring Burst Levels in the mid 100s, which, for me was ungodly high. My mind was a blank and smooth canvas stretched perfectly over the framing of Lumines. The minute I came to and consciously realized what was happening, it immediately fell apart. That’s when my brain sabotaged me.

These days, I haven’t been very adept at just existing. I’m constantly listening to a podcast or watching a YouTube essay in the background, often while playing a game. My attention drifts between said game and said podcast, and it keeps the thoughts away. Needless to say I’m a “little” short on therapy and self care right now. My mistake was in just playing Lumines, floating in the tunes and visuals, no podcast or erstwhile distraction to be had. I had become hooked, and I absolutely adore what the teams at Enhance and Monstars have done in their followup to Tetris Effect and Rez, their first game, which is one of my favorite pieces of media in all of existence. I own a copy for the PS2 and slam it on every once in a while for comfort food gaming along with the likes of Starfox 64 and the Pikmin series. Pure nostalgia delivered under a warm blanket. I am incredibly fond of everything Tetsuya Mizugushi and crew have touched, although I had never really gotten into Lumines before. However, admitting that the music in Lumines Arise isn’t the kind of stuff I would normally seek out is an understatement. But when paired with such an impeccable presentation and a highly tuned game with almost infinite skill expression opportunities backing it up, it just hits oh-so-right. That newfound growing comfort meant that as soon as I began to recognize myself existing in such an immaculate flow state – that’s when the thoughts I had been keeping at bay came marauding and finally made it over my brain’s fortified walls I had built out of constant distraction and dopamine. Walls that had been keeping them out for months.  Obviously, this was long overdue. And shame on me, yes. My therapist would be displeased in reading this, I’m sure.

I won’t go into the detail of the specific thoughts or spirals themselves. Hearing that is a burden reserved for a paid professional. Suffice it to say Lumines became a background activity as my heart rate and blood pressure climbed. If you have depression, anxiety, ADHD, Autism, OCD, or any impacting neurological “disorder” otherwise, it’s more than likely you know the exact feeling and state of being that I sat in for the following hour and a half. The “what-ifs” and “oh, fucks” were the least harmful of the the type of thinking I was going through. But, instead of rectifying the situation by pausing the game, slapping on a podcast, getting up – literally doing anything else – I leaned in. I let it happen. As I said, it was long overdue and actually becoming a problem. The stages ticked by and I realized after a while I was getting towards what I remembered to be the end. Yet the stages and tracks just kept coming. Seemingly endlessly. The discomfort and the spiral were reaching lifetime highs. Yet I could not, under any circumstance, tear myself away from those bicolored blocks as they spun and fell and matched and popped. I was determined. And I was on the verge of a panic attack the whole time. It was a breath catching in my throat, tunnel vision inducing, up-to-the-precipice kind of situation. Finally, my screen rolled over to the final stage of Survival Journey which asks that you simply survive for ten minutes. Again, I have to express that I was playing in Relaxed Mode, so the pieces only dropped when I wanted them to. As I previously noted, a novice like me, however, can still very easily end their run early by a sequence of a few bad moves. I had made it this far, so I sure as hell was not going to just let a block sit up top while the ten minutes ticked by. Instead, I kept dropping and matching as if going for a score to be proud of – at the risk of ending my run just short of victory. The music and visuals over this period of time are a swelling compilation of many of the tracks you’ve experienced throughout your Survival Journey, culminating in an excellent and epic chorus of the game’s title track “Only Human.”

As the minutes ticked down, I started feeling a new sensation. I realized I was proud of myself. Not for nearing completion of Survival Journey on Relaxed Mode 1. That’s kinda nothing, although I did have a few close calls – again, I’m terrible. But, instead, I found I was proud of how I sat in that heinous pitch-black, self-hating space for an entire hour and a half. A kind of far-beyond “uncomfortable” inverse meditation where I let the thoughts do as they pleased. I let them beat me down, remind me of everything I’d ever done wrong, all the people I’ve hurt, all the shame I’ve ever felt, until, at about the 1:30 minute mark, I burst into tears. If you’ve been to therapy, you know this exact type of outburst as well. A release more than a reaction to any specific emotion. It felt great and terrible. Through a teary blur I continued matching colors, hell bent on completing my run. Hell bent on completing this unhinged goal I had subconsciously set for myself. My brain refused to stop as I blinked and wiped and sobbed. The music came to it’s inevitable crescendo, and finally subdued into acapella repetitions of “we’re only human” as the forms of the Lumines Arise avatars gathered around my screen, surrounding me and watching my attempt at victory. So fitting and so unfair. It was one of the longest minutes of my life before that timer finally hit 0:00. As it did, I started laughing. It was over. I slumped back into my seat, completely exhausted. But finally healed, if only a little bit.

Lumines Arise gave that to me.

It seems counter that my inner breakthrough would come from the outward reaching Lumines Arise, as opposed to the inward seeking Tetris Effect, but those themes of outward celebration, I think, are what initially kicked my brain into examination mode. It spurned me to think of my own outward reaching spirit to the world and people around me. The problem is that I’m not particularly well in this exact moment, so instead of a sense of beauty and humanistic ideology, my brain reminded me where I had gone so, so wrong in the past. I wasn’t exactly someone to “self examine” when I first played Tetris Effect upon it’s release in 2014. But a decade of work has prepared me, finally, for Lumines Arise. And I’m so thankful it arrived when it did.

Lumines Arise is available here on Steam as well as on PS5.
More information can be found at lumines.game