Lumines
Review

Lumines (2004) is a music puzzle game where you rotate and align small blocks to form squares of a single colour. As you do this, in time with the music, they are erased as the beat line passes over them. The game is lost when the blocks reach the top of the playing field.

Lumines can appear similar to Columns or Tetris. It's a block-dropping game. But here you are making squares and half the enjoyment is how that interacts with the music. You can develop a range of strategies. Certain blocks with gems can create coloured squares and allow all individual adjacent blocks of the same colour to be eliminated at once. Bonuses are also awarded by reducing all remaining tiles to one single colour or by removing all non-active tiles from the screen altogether.

• Lumines: Puzzle Fusion (2004) on PSP, PC.
• Lumines Live! (2006) was ported to the Xbox 360
• Lumines II (2006) a sequel on PSP
• Lumines Plus (2007) on PlayStation 2 and PSP
• Lumines Supernova (2008) including a music sequencer on PlayStation 3
• Lumines: Touch Fusion (2009) on iOS
• Lumines: Electronic Symphony (2012) PlayStation Vita
• Lumines: Puzzle & Music (20026) on iOS, Android
• Lumines Remastered (2018) PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Lumines 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Ben Kendall and updated 8 months ago.