Lumines: Electronic Symphony

Lumines: Electronic Symphony launched alongside PlayStation Vita's debut and quickly became the title used to show off the console. The principle is simple and addictive at once: square blocks made of two colors fall from above, the player rotates and arranges them so that solid-colored two-by-two squares form. These are then swept away by a timeline that sweeps across the playing field from left to right in time with the currently playing track. The better the player times large clusters, the bigger the chain cleared in a single pass.

The result is a game that plays more like a musical instrument than a classic puzzle game. Each field has its own track, its own color scheme, and its own timeline speed, and moving up a level changes all of it at once, so the player must constantly relearn both their eyes and their hands. Special blocks, an avatar system with small abilities, and an experience meter that unlocks further content were added, giving the game a reason to keep coming back to even after mastering the base mode. Alongside an endless mode, timed and battle variants are also available. Transitions between fields happen seamlessly too, without interrupting the game, so a single session can last tens of minutes and still feels like one long track.

The soundtrack is the main star. Electronic music forms the backbone of the experience, and every block touch produces a sound that fits into the track, so even ordinary play sounds like improvisation. The visuals are accompanied by backgrounds that react to what's happening on the field, so that even simple block-stacking plays out like a music video. On Vita the game is controlled with both buttons and touch, and the sharp display with vivid colors suits the abstract visual style perfectly. Reviewers received the title very well, and many of them called it the best reason to pick up the console right from launch. Today it remains one of the best-fitting handheld games ever made, since it combines short sessions with the feeling that the player isn't shaping the music by accident.