Tetris Plus: The Best Worst Tetris Game

Posted on 2024.08.01

So, SimpleFlips is one of my favorite YouTubers, and one of my favorite things from him is his series of Tetris Plus races, where he would gather up a group of people to speedrun this game from start to finish. The thing about this game is that it’s quite a strange Tetris game (as are most pre-guideline Tetris games), and all its oddities make for a very hilarious race experience. In case you don’t know, Tetris Plus (a game released for the PS1 in 1996) features a Puzzle Mode where the goal of each level is to get the Professor (a little guy that appears on the playing field) to the bottom of the screen by clearing a set layout of blocks before the spikes at the top of the screen fall and crush him. The thing is, this game doesn’t look too hot. What makes the SimpleFlips videos so funny is that everyone in the group is constantly screaming and complaining about the game, which meshes well with their typical antics. These videos have gotten me curious to try the game out for myself, but where would I find the motivation to sit through this potentially bad game?

Well, near the end of May, an opportunity arose. Me and some friends were talking about Tetris, when suddenly, Tetris Plus was brought up. And not just in a vacuum, but specifically a call to race it. I’ve always wanted to race a game (obviously inspired by SimpleFlips), and to finally get the chance to do so and with one of the funniest options we could’ve picked for a game? Sign me up! It took us a few days to set up, but on the 3rd of June, me and two friends faced off in this 100-level marathon.

Aaaand just like the SimpleFlips videos proved, this game blows LMAOOOOO. First of all, the controls are bad. You need to hold down for a long time to get the piece to lock, a fact that’s easy to forget and leads to lots of misdrops. Another thing I found annoying was that the ceiling can collide with the pieces. I get that in old rotation systems there were no wall kicks and so your piece would not move if it’s close to a wall, but if it’s close to the ceiling?? Come on… And speaking of rotation systems, this games’ system does not do it any favors. I know this may be because I’m a modern Tetris player who’s used to SRS, but I often felt like the rotations were working against me. Additionally, the way the Professor moves is kinda janky. He moves slowly, and placing a piece even 1 pixel on top of him will make him climb over it. It’s just very weird to get a hold of, and it’s quite frustrating to have the Professor accidentally climb to his death when there was plenty of safe space right next to him.

I think the only bigger crime than everything I just mentioned is the piece randomizer. As with basically every pre-guideline Tetris game, this game has a purely random piece generator. This directly goes against the whole purpose of this puzzle game. Sometimes all you need is one more piece to clear the level, and you will make a piece grinder to quickly go through pieces in the hope of getting the 1 piece you need. Sometimes the pieces you get at the beginning are terrible and will block all entry points, so it’d probably be quicker to restart. Sometimes you will be close to finishing a level but bad luck will force you to block off your one path to success, which will make you take way longer if it doesn’t straight up kill you. In normal Tetris, the randomness offers a unique challenge where you have to adapt to survive. In this game’s Puzzle Mode, it is a hindrance that actively hurts your ability to clear levels.

Another strange thing about this game is the level sequence. The game is divided into 5 worlds with 20 levels each; four worlds are unlocked at the start and the final one is hidden until the other four are completed. You’d think this open-endedness would be cool, but this just means that there are 4 worlds with the same difficulty curve. Each one starts off extremely easy and then gets mildly more challenging as it goes. Sometimes the last few levels can be really tricky, which leads to the difficulty whiplashing back to baby mode once you clear a world and move on to the next. This game would’ve benefitted from sticking to a linear level progression with a single gradual difficulty curve. But hey, at least the last world lives up to its name! Since it’s only unlocked after clearing every other world, it fully takes advantage of that fact and truly acts like a final gauntlet. These levels feature gimmicky layouts that pose unique challenges, such as having a strict implicit timer or requiring special spins (even I-spins!). These levels are cool in theory, but in practice they can be very frustrating to play due to the aforementioned RNG problems.

So, is this a good Tetris game? No. But could it be fixed to be a good Tetris game? I… highly doubt it. I think Tetris Plus’s Puzzle Mode is just a fundamentally flawed game mode that clashes with the Tetris formula. While brainstorming with my friends potential ways this game could be better, the thing we kept coming back to was giving it guideline rules. Personally, I’m not sure this would make the experience “better”. Sure, having SRS and (more importantly) 7-bag would make the game more playable, but I fear the lack of friction would trivialize the majority of the puzzle layouts. I think a better solution would’ve been for this game to lean harder on the problem-solving type of puzzle. Give each level a predetermined finite set of pieces, and make the player have to figure out how to use the given pieces to clear the level. This would eliminate the randomness and make the game mode feel like an actual puzzle game (though, I recognize this solution could make the game feel less like a “Tetris” game).

Back to the race, one of my friends gave up on level 7 (they were stuck there for 1 hour), so it was mostly between me and the other friend. I finished first at 4am, and they finished at nearly 5am (we started at 10:30pm like idiots). I may have “won” the race but it feels more like I survived. Despite all that, I really enjoyed this experience. Even though the game itself sucked, playing it alongside friends and being able to laugh and share the frustrations really made it worth it. It’s kinda like watching a bad movie with pals! Sometimes it’s just fun to not take something so seriously, and playing this jank-ridden game with a group is a great example of that. I will not be coming back to this game anytime soon, and the only circumstance in which I’d play it again is if I ever participate in one of these stupid races again.