The Brilliant Lumines Arise Is an IQ Test I Enjoy Failing

By Garrett Martin | November 11, 2025 | 9:00am

Video Games Reviews Lumines Arise

The Brilliant Lumines Arise Is an IQ Test I Enjoy Failing

For over 20 years Lumines has done at least one thing better than any other game: make me feel dumb as hell. I think when Tetsuya Mizuguchi first created Lumines he was driven by a single guiding principle: to make some guy named Garrett Martin, who hadn’t even ever written about a video game yet when development started on the original PSP game, feel like the stupidest person who’s ever lived. Mission accomplished, Mizuguchi-san.

It’s very clearly a “me” problem. Lumines is built on a brilliant core idea that’s clearly defined, clearly communicated, and should be clearly manageable—and yet my simple ape-like brain can barely parse it. I get the basics. I think I get the basics. I fail so hard at performing the basics. But I remain entranced throughout, the game’s synesthetic combo of music and visuals aligning with its puzzle logic to repeatedly stump me in the most aesthetic and enjoyable of ways. Lumines is fantastic, has always been fantastic, and Lumines Arise, its latest permutation, is as fantastic as ever.

It also makes me feel dumb in entirely new ways. Exciting ways, even. More on that in a bit, though. The basic beat remains the same: blocks made up of four squares of two different patterns fall slowly from above, and you have to arrange them so that four squares of the same pattern form a single four-by-four block. Unlike a Tetris line, though, those blocks don’t immediately disappear; there’s a line that moves horizontally from left to right on beat with the music, and that line clears a block as it passes it. So if you form a four-by-four block at the right side of the screen while the line is starting back at one on the far left, that block will stay there for a full measure. You don’t just have to match: you have to account for patterns and how squares will fall when blocks are cleared, while also factoring in the rhythm of that line. It’s beautiful, and intoxicating, and a real god-damned son of a bitch, all at once.

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Lumines Arise review

My problem isn’t the beat. It’s not even finding the best place to put a new block, or rotating its squares to the optimal position. My problem is seeing the future, and understanding where squares will fall when blocks beneath them are cleared. It’s a personal failing I have tried long and hard to correct but that remains stubborn and incorrigible. It makes me a bad Lumines player. I am bad at Lumines. But in a sign of the inherent greatness of Lumines, I don’t even care: I dig this game about as much as I possibly could, even though I’d crap out at the bottom percentile of almost any competition. When the juice is real and strong it tastes sweet even when it obliterates your ass, and you better believe Lumines Arise has the juice.

The last entirely new game in the series, 2012’s Vita masterpiece Lumines: Electronic Symphony, added on to that core by introducing blocks that let you eliminate chains of the same color or shuffle the colors of a cluster of squares. Arise likewise adds a new feature, and even though it seems pretty idiot-proof, I manage to foul it up at least half the time. As you clear blocks, a “burst” counter grows, maxing out at 100%; once it’s halfway there, you can trigger it, at which point you have up to four measures to add on to your most recently cleared block. If you form adjacent blocks of the same color during those four measures, it’ll throw off any squares of the opposite color touching it, letting you build massive blocks that can clear huge swaths of the field in a single sweep. And all those oppositely colored squares that are cast off will return once the burst period ends, resulting in another mass clear. Like the chains of Electronic Symphony (which are also present in Arise), the burst mechanic will regularly save your life, letting you wipe out a ton of blocks when you most need to make space. It’s also easy to mess up, if you are dumb like me and drop too many squares of the opposite color around your block. A single block needs to have four squares of the same color in a four-by-four pattern; with burst you can multiply that dozens of times over, and every time you screw up and somehow only clear the equivalent of, say, seven blocks you will feel like an abject failure at life. That happened to me more than I would like to admit. Again: Lumines makes me feel dumb.

It’s that failure that makes the game so satisfying when I don’t mess up, of course. And fortunately Arise comes with many different ways to play, so if I’m doing particularly terrible at online head-to-head play (which, uh, I always do particularly terribly at) I can hop back over to the main single-player mode, Journey, which is broken into several different chapters with four or five levels each. They flow seamlessly together in Journey, but if you fail one and your game ends, you can pick up from the specific one you lost at; it’ll ding the letter grade you’re awarded at the end of that chapter, but at least it’ll let you complete that one and unlock the next without having to finish it all from the very start. That is very important when you are as dumb and bad at Lumines Arise as I am.

If I have a complaint about Arise, it’d come down to something that’s incidental to the actual puzzle-solving yet still absolutely crucial to the game. That’s the music. I have to note that Lumines does not traditionally feature music I would ever choose to listen to on my own time—its heavy on electronic music made by DJs I have never otherwise heard of, and very light on my preferred soundtrack of late 20th century college radio music and/or free jazz—but previous installments have always had at least a handful of tracks I get stuck in my head outside of the game. Arise doesn’t clear that bar. The music is still ideal for what Lumines is and has always been, though, and I can’t complain about that. I might not buy any of it on Bandcamp, but this crop of dance tunes fits the tone and aesthetic Arise is aiming for.

Look: I am old enough to thoroughly know my own limitations. There are some things I will never be good at. (One of them, you’re probably desperate to mention in the comments, is writing game reviews—particularly ones of Lumines games.) I suck at golf. I’m bad at faking interest at boring video game industry events. I’m essentially smell-blind. And I will probably never be good at Lumines. I’m excellent at appreciating Lumines, though, and that’s especially true with Lumines Arise—which is another beautiful, transfixing, exhilarating puzzler guaranteed to stimulate both your senses and your brain. Even the really, really dumb brains.

Lumines Arise was developed by Enhance Games and Monstars Inc. and published by Enhance Games. Our review is based on both the PlayStation 5 and PC versions.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.