Lumines Remastered

Lumines Remastered is an updated version of the puzzle game originally created for PSP in 2004 by a team led by Tetsuya Mizuguchi. The core concept remains the same as in the original – the player arranges square blocks made of four colored tiles and lets them disappear along the battle line, which sweeps across the field in time with the background music, so the more precise the timing, the smoother the game looks and sounds.

Enhance, the publisher Mizuguchi founded years later, reworked the graphics into full HD resolution for the PlayStation 4 version in 2018, smoothed out the animations, and added support for online leaderboards. The soundtrack remained unchanged, but the higher resolution and cleaner visual style make the game a better fit for a big television screen than the PSP display of the time. Compared to later entries in the series, this is a return to the core concept of the very first Lumines rather than a complete collection of all the game modes that appeared over the course of the series.

The same year this remaster came out, Enhance also released its own project, Tetris Effect, so in 2018 the studio was working on two music-driven puzzle games at once – one a return to an older classic, the other a brand-new title. Lumines Remastered thus also served as a reminder of where Mizuguchi's approach to combining music and puzzles actually comes from. The PlayStation 4 version was the first in a group of remastered ports – equivalent versions arrived on Xbox One, Switch, and mobile devices only later, so the PS4 release represents the starting point of this whole wave, with the rest of the ports building on it visually and technically.

Why play: For players who know Lumines from the PSP and want the same experience on a big screen with sharper graphics, the remaster is the obvious choice. For newcomers it offers an easy-to-grasp yet addictive puzzle concept that still works just as well more than ten years after the original.

Why play: Fans of the PSP original will appreciate the same addictive concept in noticeably sharper graphics on a big screen, while newcomers need only a few minutes for this simple but catchy music puzzle to grow on them.