Lumines Remastered – Flow Chart of a Flow State

All humans have a knack for squares.* Some humans have a knack for rhythm.

Lumines leverages these two "knacks" to dangerous effect. I have played over 30 hours in the past week, compelled by a near-primal urge. I must shake, shake my body. But there's another piece of implicit knowledge that Lumines weaponizes: gravity. And its impact on the game's design is deceptively profound, reinforcing the "flow state" synonymous with Mizuguchi's work.

Lumines' most frequent point of comparison is Tetris, and for good (er, well-meaning) reason. You rotate and drop multicolored, 2x2 blocks on a grid, though this time with the goal of forming squares/rectangles of a single color. These squares are then cleared from the board. Like Tetris, you lose if these blocks exceed the grid's height limit. From there, however, the similarities dry up.

Each stage in Lumines is accompanied by a unique aesthetic and music track.

In Tetris, gravity is case-dependent, applying only when a tetromino descends and when the line beneath said tetromino is cleared. That's because Tetris is a packing game; tetrominoes falling to the lowest possible point wouldn't offer much in terms of fun factor (not to mention that they'd no longer be tetrominoes). There'd be no place to T-spin! Instead, gravity in Lumines is constant: if the block is in play, so too is gravity.

Of the games discussed, Tetris is the one I've spent the least amount of time with.
You can probably tell from this screenshot!

Big whoop, you say. Panel de Pon has constant gravity too! And like Lumines, it's a combo-chaining matching game—you make squares/lines, which when cleared drop the blocks above them which can then make squares/lines, which when cleared drop the blocks above them... you see the pattern. And yes, both of those statements are true. But the key distinction is that in Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League, the blocks enter the playing field—randomly generated—from the bottom, up. The player isn't creating and pruning their own playing field, like in Tetris and Lumines, but instead managing the overgrowth of blocks handed to them. Player agency is reactive, rather than proactive.

While true of each of these games, you're most vulnerable to RNG in Panel de Pon 
(Tetris Attack seen here).

So Lumines is a proactive game like Tetris, but a combo-chaining matching game, like Panel de Pon. But why is it not like the other girls? What's its back-of-the-box, capital "M" Mechanic?

That would be the metronome. A vertical line sweeps across the screen in time with the music, clearing completed squares as it passes. It meaningfully contextualizes and quantifiably limits the player's "proactivity"—there's a finite scramble to stack blocks as high as possible, to predict where each block will fall and further extend a given combo. Panel de Pon, with its emphasis on "reactivity," limits you by what's on screen. Clear what you can, and you're left twiddling your thumbs as the playing field fills in afresh.** The skill ceiling for Lumines' strain of proactivity is much higher, given that you can control the pace with which you stack blocks between bars *and* prepare for combos several clears in advance.

The orange bar is the metronome, seen here erasing blocks.

While the metronome struts about as the featured ingredient, the secret sauce—as alluded to above—remains intuition. Intuition regarding squares, regarding rhythm (e.g. metronome), and, more subtly, regarding gravity. The seasoned player is keenly aware of the blocks in their queue,*** the metronome's tempo, and the latent combos waiting for gravity's catalyst. Yet these considerations are all underpinned by innate, subconscious understandings of shapes, music, and the fact that what's up must eventually come down. That zone between awareness and instinct is the breeding ground for flow states.

Lumines is such a singular concept, and I can't stress enough how the seemingly innocuous decision of constant in-game gravity sets it apart from its peers in spite of a shared design language. It could easily be hand-waved away as another Tetris clone. But small design decisions overwhelmingly contribute to a peerless thesis of flow.

*This is a fascinating article, which in its findings notes that the ability to recognize right angles and parallel sidings is unique to humans and transcends culture and education.

**There is a button that allows you to fill in the screen one row at a time, but it still slows down pacing and reinforces a reactive playstyle.

***I still very much suck at this.

Dispatch – Horny Junk Food

Dispatch seems aimed at fifteen-year-old boys. Characters say "fuck." A lot. They think only of sex, sulk at bars to blow off steam, and have the communication skills of, well, fifteen-year-old boys. There's an uptight blonde and a manic pixie bad bitch to choose between. There are big butts and bare boobs. There's a band of misfits that learns to work together, a grizzled veteran that teaches them, and a villain with roughly five minutes of screen time. To call Dispatch a grab-bag of sophomoric tropes and horndoggery would be an understatement.

Oh, and the gameplay? It's buns. Filler between story beats.

But I still had fun with Dispatch. It was fun to embrace the edgy and the horny, to hear Aaron Paul make a meal out of another VA gig ("Hooray!"). It was fun to soak in the gorgeous animation, to watch for the directorial flourishes propping up the flimsy script. It was fun to "be there," to have my expectations managed by first impressions and not by comprehensive reviews. But the novelty is gone. And as a known quantity, Dispatch is far less exciting.

To give the briefest of briefings, Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy. Robert, the protagonist, is an Iron Man-adjacent ex-superhero who is hired to manage a team of reformed supervillains and send them out on calls. "Gameplay" consists of matching calls with the team member whose stats are most appropriate (picking someone fast to evacuate people from a burning building, e.g.). Players choose between dialogue options to shape and further the story.

Riveting.

A big sticking point for me with this style of choice-driven, dialogue-heavy game is the idea of "possibility space." Do my dialogue choices feel weighty, like they'll cascade into new scenes, alternate endings, or hidden character moments? That's possibility space, and it's something that Dispatch consistently nails at a micro level: you envision the branching paths behind each dialogue option, your chest tightens as the timer menacingly ticks down, forcing you to choose, and the pressure releases as the characters in your orbit take note of your decision. Each choice is a venture into the unknown, and with that comes the hope that some gripping development is just around the corner.

Titillating.

The same can be said of the episodic release schedule. I was let down by most of Dispatch, waiting for a deepening of themes and a crystallization of characters. But with each episode drop, there was the same hope that next week would see the gameplay evolve into something meaty and the juvenility into something meaningful. That week never came. The writing remained as frustrating as ever.

***HEAVY SPOILERS FOLLOW***

Dispatch's big "twist" is that Invisigal, the aforementioned "manic pixie bad bitch," is a double agent sent to seduce Robert and steal his mech suit's power source. Fair enough. Then the incessant raunchiness, the sexual tension, it means something, right? It's all part of the psyop? Wrong. In episode three—before any of this information comes to light, mind you—Invisigal dreams that she's making love to Robert. The scene leaves little to the imagination. It's such a waste! Sex is a powerful storytelling tool: trusting, vulnerable, sometimes impulsive. For the writers to blow their load (heh) on a dream sequence in a story of seduction and betrayal—confusing the narrative in the process (Does she love Robert? Isn't that ending-dependent?)—is the definition of "gratuitous."

"Don't be such a prude!", the straw men say. To which I counter that it's not prudish to know that the difference between art and pornography is intent. And I have to ask myself, what's the intent of a game that sells a swimsuit special as DLC?

So yeah, Dispatch was fun. Like junk food. Brightly packaged, unsubstantial, and appealing to the child within—the fifteen-year-old child.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance – Escape and Expression

I'm in the process of chipping away at the early game in Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD). It's a game that demands attention to its systems and rewards attention to its interpretation of history,* so my progress has been slow.

You play as Henry, the son of a blacksmith in 1403 Bohemia. Things kick off with the murder of Henry's parents at the hands of the invading Hungarian army. He escapes to a nearby town and lays low before returning home to bury his mother and father, driven by Christian duty to honor the dead.

KCD is a choice-driven RPG. Many problems the player faces are open-ended, their respective solutions giving shape to Henry's character and morals. You can bribe, steal, kill, and wreak havoc just as easily as you can uphold the social contract and run everyone's errands like a good RPG boy. NPCs respond to Henry in kind, respecting chivalrous acts and reviling dishonorable ones. Yet that systemic dynamism collapses under the narrative's weight—you WILL be funneled into acting out Henry's escape and return. That rigidity exposes a conflicting approach to role-playing that doesn't quite pan out, at least not in the early game.

On the return trip, as you prepare to lay your parents to rest, you encounter the aftermath of the Hungarian invasion—corpses are strewn across the road, wagon tracks crisscross the blood-soaked earth, and smoldering fire pits denote the invaders' recent encampments. The corpses themselves are laden with goodies. Imperishable foods, valuable clothes, and raw currency are yours for the taking, should you so desire. And desire I did!

A snapshot from the journey home. You can't turn off the HUD, oddly enough.

Or rather, I felt pressured to loot. KCD tasks the player with managing their hunger. You can starve. And I, faced with starvation and belly-up Bohemians, acted in favor of my future food/financial security. I stuffed every pocket on my person with apples, bread, and cheese. I pilfered coins, jewelry, and clothing. I wasn't proud of my actions, but I felt justified and was eager to see how they would further define Henry.

They didn't. Upon arriving home, Henry encounters and confronts another looter, chastising him for disrespecting the dead and chasing him out of town, sword in hand. Despite having looted corpses only moments before, there's no indication of guilt or shame (how very un-Catholic), or even recognition of his hypocrisy. It's a dissonant anticlimax that wastes an exciting role-playing opportunity.

The thick black bars are a little much, in my opinion.

Blending a named character/defined narrative with moral flexibility/choice-driven dialogue is ambitious and destined for messiness, in large part because those ingredients belong to two separate recipes for role-play: role-play as escape and role-play as expression. Escape is to inhabit a prewritten character. Expression is to reflect one's own attitudes and flaws onto a blank slate.

I admire Kingdom Come: Deliverance for facing that messiness head-on and experimenting with both of these recipes. On paper, the former allows for an epic, personal narrative, while the latter vindicates video games as the storytelling medium of choice.** At this point in my playthrough, though, that harmony between recipes has yet to be realized.

But I remain optimistic! Henry is not fully a blank slate. He's written in pencil and subject to change. And for the ambitious design that connotes, I can forgive the smudges.

*KCD may not be a scholarly resource (nor is ANY piece of entertainment), but it is successful at evoking the general period.

**I'm playing through AdHoc's Dispatch, at the moment, which operates firmly in the territory of role-play as escape. While I've enjoyed my time, I continue to wonder: "Does this benefit from being a video game?"

Promise Mascot Agency – Veggies Before Dessert

Running a business is hard. Just stand within spitting distance of a business owner and you'll probably hear about their 80-hour work weeks, their strained marriages, their missed piano recitals. While the employee (generally) strives for a sustained, career-long work-life balance, the business owner (generally) strives to front-load their efforts, to eat all their proverbial vegetables first and then gorge on proverbial dessert until the end of their days. Yet that's so rarely the case in real life. If only there were a means of wish fulfillment...

Promise Mascot Agency gives you, a disgraced yakuza banished to podunk Japan, the reins of a fledgling business. You've got to generate cash for your clan by recruiting and leasing out mascots* to various municipal and corporate functions. Fail to send enough money home, and it's game over.

In practice you drive/fly around the island of Kaso-Machi, stumbling across collectibles, NPCs, and the many other distractions littered about. Mascots are managed via a menu where you can assign them to certain jobs and reward them bonuses. These systems are simple enough in and of themselves, but that simplicity doesn't necessarily translate to ease (on Hard Mode**).

A sampling of the management systems.

Of the 15ish hours I've played, the first eight were nail-biting. I explored very little of the island and completed very few side quests, devoting most of my time to a heated battle against bills and remittances. Under the threat of a game over, there was little choice but to claw my way into the black.

And therein lies the secret sauce—obligation. Kaso-Machi is an open world. I could have gone anywhere, collected anything, and finished any side quest, but I didn't because there were bills to pay and a clan to placate. My desires were in constant competition with my duties.

The meter is always ticking down, satiated only by yen.

But bit by bit, my profit margins increased. I hired more mascots, established more contracts, and further diversified my revenue streams. Work, work, work. Eventually, my loyal employees ("They're like family!") and passive income freed up the time to chase after the collectibles and side quests that once taunted me. Play, play, play.

Crucially, that front-loaded difficulty curve parallels the romanticized work-to-play arc of the business owner: you earn your stripes as a long-suffering member of the lower middle class (frugality is a virtue), you receive the recognition you deserved all along (virtue is rewarded), and lastly you exploit the workers beneath you (virtue alone doesn't pay the bills).

Okay, so maybe not that last part. But in the late game you do shunt most of your financial responsibilities to your employees. Money becomes an afterthought, and you get to roam the island at your leisure.

You'll progress from wheels to wings as you upgrade your vehicle.

Speaking of money as an afterthought, Persona 5 makes for an excellent point of comparison with Promise Mascot Agency: they're both genre mashups (life sim/dungeon crawler vs. management sim/collectathon) attempting to unify those genres via their in-game economies. In my opinion, Persona 5 fails at doing so. Its in-game economy a) allows one genre to outshine the other and b) undermines the role-playing experience.

I say this not to dunk on Persona 5 (and not *only* to plug my post), but to point to where Promise Mascot Agency really shines! The transition of its in-game economy from a leaky faucet in the early game to an open floodgate in the mid-to-late game meaningfully shapes how the management sim and collectathon interact (e.g., obligation) *and* reinforces the role-playing fantasy of business ownership. It turns out that eating your vegetables first makes dessert taste that much sweeter.

*I don't want to get lost in the weeds re: Japanese mascot culture, so here's a helpful source on the subject.

**I cannot recommend Hard Mode enough! Normal Mode does a disservice to the game's themes and systems (and nullifies my whole argument, haha).