Tetris Forever – PS5 Review

Tetris Forever is a digital documentary, a compilation of various Tetris and Tetris-inspired games that tells the history of one of the most important titles in gaming history.  It comes to us by way of Digital Eclipse who have been carving a niche in this sort of gaming history area with what they are calling their Gold Master Series.  This is the third entry into that with us having previously looked at Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story and The Making of Karateka.

As with those titles, Tetris Forever mixes documentary/museum features with a compilation of key titles to go along with them and it does it to great effect.  So what you get are 18 playable games from the original first version of the game (Tetris on the Electronika 60) to the brand new Tetris Time Warp, a newly created title that warps you through various versions of the game.  More on that later.

The story of Tetris is told from the very beginning via interviews and images from the game’s initial creation by Alexey Pajitnov (who is interviewed in-depth about it) to the battle for the game’s licensing as told by the man who brought the game to the West, Henk Rogers.  It’s an oft-told but still fascinating story about a game that almost every gamer above Fortnite eligibility age has played a version of.  And Digital Eclipse have done such a great job of putting all the information together while Alexey and Henk really convey what it was to be a part of the creation and distribution of a game which had such a huge impact on gaming.

In terms of the games offered, there are plenty but, of course, this only represents a fraction of the number of Tetris games that ever got released.  Most of the important ones are here though.  With the original Electronika 60 version arguably being the most fascinating.  Coming it English and native language options (as well as in vintage monitor green or white hues), this is as simple as Tetris gets.  The monochrome colour scheme, the basic controls (with no soft drop) and the fact that the tetrominos are made of blocks that are just closed square brackets.  It’s as primitive as it gets and yet is still playable and, shockingly, still pretty addictive.  The associated trophies from score and lines cleared are a little bit beyond us, but it’s still oddly enjoyable.

From there you get the MS-DOS version, various SNES, NES and Game Boy titles, including the famous original Game Boy Tetris which was the game that ultimately sparked the series to worldwide acclaim and a few spin-offs such as the Bombliss and Hattris games.  It’s all a bit of a mixed bag.   We’re not sure we need Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss AND Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss Genteiban (actually we don’t particularly like any of the Bombliss games) but it’s good to have everything here, just for the completeness of the collection.

The period of games included really only goes into the ’90s with Super Tetris 3 (from 1994) being the latest actual Tetris game while the Bombliss titles go all the way up to 1998’s Super Bombliss DX (a late Game Boy title).  Of course that means that a whole heap of brilliant Tetris titles aren’t included so don’t expect to see Tetris Effect or Puyo Puyo Tetris included.  We’d have loved to have seen our favourite, Tetris Pro, included but that was a public domain Amiga game so that would have been a miracle.  But at least Ubisoft’s risible Tetris Ultimate isn’t included either.

The new entry to the series, Tetris Time Warp, is pretty interesting.  This is a purely single player take on the game that starts of as a normal looking modern version of Tetris with all the same basic mechanics that you are used to but occasionally a differently coloured piece will drop down and, if you can use it in a completed line (we’ve just realised we haven’t explained the basic rules of Tetris, but we really don’t need to do we?) you’ll be warped to another version of the game.

So all of a sudden you could be playing the Electronika 60 version of the game, or the Game boy one, or a version of Bombliss and you’ll be given a quick objective to beat (usually clear a double or a specific number of lines) and that will then warp you to another version or, ultimately, back to the main game.  It’s a good idea in practice but there are some issues.

Aside from the fact that Tetris Time Warp has very vanilla production compared to the last big Tetris game (Tetris Effect), it only really ever seems to go to the same three or four games and when it does, the pre-defined block layouts don’t always lend themselves to you beating the challenge.  It just doesn’t always seem doable.  Also, there’s no standardisation across the games in terms of controls.  The same button doesn’t always rotate or hard drop or whatever.

And regardless of what version of the game you are playing, there’s that age old problem with Tetris games, and any clone of them, eventually the game speed just gets too much.  Unless you’re one of these crazy kids in the news who can finish the NES version of Tetris.  For normal people like us, eventually the game will just start spewing bricks at you too quickly.  Besides, Chime was always way better than Tetris anyway.

So, ultimately, we’d say that the documentary piece here is arguably more valuable that the curated list of games.  Sure, you could have just made a YouTube documentary about the game and had much the same result but it is nice being able to dip into the games that are being talked about.  And there’s still something magical about that original version and this was the first time we got to play it.