The big question around any new handheld is always: what’s going to be the new Tetris? For the DS, I’m tempted to say Tetris was Zoo Keeper. For the PSP, Tetris was definitely Lumines, a game that, on a good day, is arguably even better than Tetris in the first place. The Switch? The Switch is such an idiosyncratic console, so strange and yet so familiar. It makes sense, really, that the Switch’s Tetris was Tetris.
Kind of. In fact it was Puyo Puyo Tetris, and I don’t care what you have to say about Zelda, this cut-price puzzle game, a port of a game first released in 2014, was all you needed for the Switch in the early days. (I appreciate it just missed launch.)
Puyo Puyo Tetris is Tetris and Puyo Puyo. It plays a lovely game of Tetris, with simple readable blocks, lots of colour, and all of the various upgrades like hold and soft- and hard-drops and ghosts. It also plays a lovely game game of Puyo Puyo, the stickiest, sugariest puzzle game of all time in which little blobs of gel fall from the ceiling and must be dealt with.
