Arise and rejoice! Lumines makes its long-awaited return in 2025 with Lumines Arise. This rhythmic block stacking, tile-matching title is developed and published by Enhance along with Monstars Inc. While the studio behind the game is different, this title was conceived, produced, and worked on by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the CEO of Enhance and the original designer for the Lumines series. The team at Enhance (including director Takashi Ishihara) are known for their “synesthetic” sensory experiences in their games, which they previously adapted into the Tetris series via the massively acclaimed Tetris Effect. Now they are bringing a similar approach to the eclectic and long-dormant Lumines series.
Two By Two
While no two tile-matching puzzle games are quite the same, Lumines checks many similar boxes as its genre peers. You get a random assortment of blocks to drop into a grid, in this case a board 16 tiles wide and 10 tiles high. Clear the blocks out, get points. The more blocks you clear, the faster the game drops new blocks on you, giving you less time and forcing you to react quicker.
For those unaware of the particulars of Lumines, every block you drop is a 2×2 square, with 4 tiles per block that can be a random assortment of two colors/designs. The idea is to rotate and drop these blocks to make as many 2×2 squares of the same color/design tiles as possible. You can combine 2×2 squares into some relatively oblong shapes (e.g. 3×2 since there’s two overlapping 2x2s). A clear line will pass through your board at a pace set to the rhythm of the music, swiping from left to right to clear any valid squares/shapes you make in real time. Once in a while, you will get a Chain Block, a single tile with a + shape on it that will chain together adjacent tiles of the same color, and all of these will be cleared.
Clear enough squares and the game’s level will go up, with every few levels changing your board to a new aesthetic and accompanying piece of music (called Skins). While the game drops blocks faster, it also gets more difficult based on how quickly the clear bar slides to the right, with slower speeds actually being less favorable unless you’re really skillful at the game.
The fundamentals of Lumines haven’t changed too much since the beginning of the series, but they don’t particularly need to. This gameplay is incredibly addictive on its own, and it can become quite the rush as you start to improve your reaction times and grasp the sort of underlying logic to how to efficiently stack your blocks in order to keep your board clean and maximize your score. What helps immerse the player in the experience is how it uses its visuals and audio to tie gameplay to its music; every input you make syncs up sound effects as audio feedback with the current stage music. This helps give Lumines Arise its rhythmic quality, making you feel like you’re dictating not just the board state but also the presentation of the game itself.
Of course, Lumines Arise didn’t come without a share of new ideas to boot.
A Burst of Energy
Lumines Arise’s signature new feature for gameplay is Burst. As you clear out your board, you build up a percentage meter (noted above the clear line). When that reaches at least 50%, you can press a button to activate Burst mode, with higher percentages (up to 100%) giving you more time in Burst. In this state, your objective is mainly to try to make the largest square possible, and dropping blocks of one color onto it will push the tiles of the other color into the sky, where they will drop back down once the Burst expires (usually making a bunch of new squares as well). This is a way to get a massive boost to your score very quickly. It’s also a good emergency band-aid to have on hand, as it temporarily prevents blocks from autodropping and prevents you from game overing, buying you some time to create some space if your board is getting full.
Burst is an incredibly welcome feature, one which feels so natural that I imagine series newcomers will be surprised to learn it hasn’t always been there. I initially feared that it might sap too much tension out of the single player modes given Chain Blocks historically already fulfilled the purpose of helping you get out of a jam, but this is not the case and it still requires you to be skillful to get the most use out of it.
Speaking of difficulty, the game comes with three different difficulty options out of the gate, the usual Easy/Normal/Hard. I generally stuck to Normal given that for all my glazing of this game, I’m far from elite at it and I like to play at my own pace. From what I could tell by dabbling in Hard mode, it requires more blocks to advance from one Skin to the next, and the blocks start dropping faster earlier, so there’s less room for error. If you really want to take it easy, there’s even a No-Stress Lumines option which can prevent blocks from dropping or eliminate the game’s fail-state outright. On top of that, there’s a boatload of more accessibility features to help adjust the game to your liking, including several colorblind options and a setting to disable specifically spiders and snakes in the background for those with arachnophobia or ophidiophobia.
The ability to customize Lumines Arise to your liking is quite welcome, because this game ascends from just “video game” and into a full on somatosensory experience.
Inner Fullness
In applying the aesthetic design principles Enhance originally put into Tetris Effect, they have turned Lumines Arise into one of the most meditative and pleasing puzzle games I have ever experienced. The Skins in this game are as visually eclectic as the music is sonically, with both having all manner of different genres and styles. These skins are downright awe-inducing with their visual creativity and occasional weirdness, and it just feels right with the accompanying score. While some of them are mellow and others are loud and in your face, the whole experience felt immersive, seldom breaking as the time just passed by as I played. This is a game you can just lose yourself in for an entire play session.
The visual elements of this game are also immensely satisfying to watch. One simple aesthetic modification from earlier Lumines games is that in many Skins, adjacent squares start to merge their shape together, especially as you make big squares (e.g. 3×3 and 4×4), creating these big and satisfying blobs to clear. The use of color and shape is as meticulously crafted as it is inventive, with neat flourishes aplenty. One Skin for example features window and windmill tiles, and as you rotate your 2×2 block the windmill tiles rotate as well. Another Skin features green and red fruits and vegetables which gradually start to shift from one to another (apple to tomato to pepper), which I really am at a loss for poignant ways to even describe it beyond just saying that it’s neat as hell. Still images almost don’t do justice to how Lumines Arise looks in motion, let alone how it feels.
The soundtrack by Hydelics is similarly superb, with a nice mix of relaxing, aggressive, and even just plain weird music. There’s plenty of EDM of all manner of styles and tempos, with some tracks delving into jazz sounds and others into stuff like pop, hip-hop, and R&B with both original sounds and clever use of sampling. Not every song is going to appeal to every player (I’m not a fan of some of the tracks with heavily processed vocals for example), but the sheer variety of this game’s assortment of music keeps it from ever getting stale as an experience. And there was no shortage of headbobbing and toetapping throughout my playtime.
Where Does The Time Go?
The natural place to start your journey into Lumines Arise is in the game’s, well, Journey mode. The Standard option has you playing through a series of groups of 4 to 5 Skins each. This is a pretty beginner-friendly mode to get you into the game from the start and to experience each of the Skins in relatively bite-sized packages. If you fail, you can restart on the Skin you’re already on. At the end of this is a final medley called “Destiny”, which is just a wonderful way to cap things off. After clearing Standard, you unlock Survival mode, where you can play through all 35 Skins of Journey in a row in a way similar to the Basic mode of classic Lumines. I spent a good share of time here trying to beat Survival, which is itself a fun little challenge, if quite time-consuming.
If I had to voice one minor gripe to this experience, it’s that the scenes of each Skin are so dramatically different now that the game stops everything to take a moment to transition from one to the next rather than doing it seamlessly as the older Lumines games did. It’s a rare moment that interrupts the action, and it can take a second to regain your bearings once you transition to a new Skin and try to quickly parse just how you left your board state and get back to clearing. Apart from that, however, this is the Lumines I’ve come to know and love with the nice bells and whistles Arise has added.
If you want to just play a series of Skins of your choice, you can make custom playlists with your favorites. There are also a few side missions that have their own little minigames and gimmicks to play along with for some added variety. If you head into the multiplayer menu, there are a few other options such as time attack to see how many blocks you can clear in a short time period, plus a mode called Dig Down where the game will fill the board with blocks from the bottom row periodically for some added tension.
There’s also a head-to-head multiplayer and ranked mode for the game. As with many tile-matching puzzle games, Lumines Arise’s multiplayer works by pitting you 1v1 against another player. The better you perform on your board, the more garbage blocks you send to the other player to give them less room to work with and make them top out quicker. Unlike many tile-matching puzzle games, these blocks drop from the sides rather than the top or bottom, squeezing them out of space in a bit of a different way from something like Puyo Puyo and/or Tetris. It’s a fun and neat mode. When I queued up, I found players of wildly disparate skill, some who I could beat fairly handily and others who are far more adept than myself who utterly crushed me, so I can’t quite say I found the pool of players to be very even. Still, the mode is there to offer somewhere to take your skills and compete against others, and those occasional matches of near-equal skill can be enthralling.
Verdict
Lumines Arise offers one of the most joyous experiences I’ve had yet in a video game, one I will keep coming back to for years to come. It’s a meticulously crafted effort of love, love which shines through every part of the experience. It takes a winning formula and touches it up enough to bring it more life than Lumines has maybe ever had. It’s not just one of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played; it’s one of the best and most triumphant releases of 2025 all around. Seldom does a game just melt away the time and the bad vibes quite like this one. Please, play this game.
LUMINES ARISE IS A MUST BUY
If you are looking for more on puzzle games, you might want to check out our article on The Enduring Appeal of Tile Matching Puzzle Games (and Why They’re Perhaps Underappreciated).
Many thanks go to Enhance for a PC review code for Lumines Arise.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
