Every morning, I wake up in The Cynical World.
Anger fires into my veins before the cortisol even hits. 
I feel my bodily functions evolving in response to the wretched world outside of my bed, 
Like it's releasing an antidote to the poison seeping into my nostrils. 
The air gets thicker each day to counter my defense. 
It is an arms race with no end.
Every morning, I wake up in The Cynical World. 
If some horror story in the news doesn’t set me off before I can get out of bed, 
I’ll find some other way to get my morning dose of spite. 
A one-sided rival running their mouth again. 
An innocuous opinion on a movie. 
A friend saying something I fully agree with, but in an annoying way. 
It’s black coffee all the same.
Every morning, I wake up in The Cynical World. 
Haven’t I had this argument before? 
Haven’t I fought this battle before? 
I tumble through the circular days,
Like a pair of sneakers in a laundromat’s perpetually-busted washing machine. 
It reaches the end of its cycle with a click, but the dial keeps turning right. 
It slows for a moment, then I am ricocheting off the metal again. 
Thump. Thump. Thump.
In these dim days, light is a precious resource. You have to search the ceiling for cracks and bask in the rays that shine through them. A positive news story. Friendly small talk with your local bodega guy. A good video game.
When I play Lumines Arise, 
I am no longer in The Cynical World. 
I am a cat in a sunbeam.

Let’s reset the tempo. Just drums this time, four on the floor.

Lumines Arise is the latest dose of musical psychedelia from Tetris Effect developer Enhance. It offers a new spin on a cult classic rhythm puzzle game by former Sega mastermind Tetsuya Mizuguchi. In it, players drop two-toned 2×2 squares into a horizontal well and match colors to form bigger squares. That process happens as a song thumps through the speakers and a tempo bar slides from left to right across the well, counting the measure. When the bar passes a matched square, it disappears and points are scored based on its size. It’s more Puyo Puyo than Tetris, a game that’s all about thinking one measure ahead to set up combo chains.

Enhance keeps that excellent gameplay formula intact, only building on it in spots that compliment it. Arise’s one distinct innovation comes in the form of a Burst system. The more points players rack up, the more they build up a Burst meter. Activating it starts a window of time where players can build up one gigantic square over multiple measures. It’s a musical breakdown in game form. The music comes down and the block on screen builds up. Bigger, bigger, bigger — and then, the drop. The block vanishes in a grand crescendo as the music floods back in. Working in tandem with the series’ color-linking special blocks, Burst is just fresh enough to add a new movement to a round without changing the all-important rhythm.

That basic structure gets put to good use across several modes. A list of missions acts as a tutorial, explaining the nuances of a simple puzzle game with deceptive depth. Advanced challenges play around with the format, tasking players with making matches with unusually shaped pieces or forming matches around an egg to crack it. There’s a robust set of multiplayer options to dig into, from competitive Burst Battles (in which players send garbage to their opponents’ screen by creating Bursts) to mini-challenges like time attacks that have their own online leaderboards. All of those options, in addition to Loomii-Pon avatars that can be customized with hundreds of unlockables, already make Arise the most content-rich Lumines game out there. And that’s before getting into its signature mode: Journey.

Bring in the bass. Speed it up.

Image: Enhance

Journey is the heart of Lumines Arise. It’s not just a level-clearing, high score-chasing challenge mode. It’s where Arise vibrates your bones, where it hypnotizes you, where it makes you feel like a video game can be a transcendent experience.

In it, you play through each of Arise’s 35 levels in batches. Each one, set to a different piece of music with its own pace-setting tempo, throws a psychedelic backdrop behind the well and changes the blocks you’re dropping to match the theme.

• My blocks become red peppers and green broccoli as giant fruits are sliced in the background.
• A black spider hanging over the well weaves its web as I match balls of silk.
• Pigeon feathers rain down to the sounds of breakneck jazz.

Each scene is an explosion of creative splendor, building on the visual spectacle that made Tetris Effect such a revelation in 2018. It’s an unpredictable journey through musical genres, through animal kingdoms, through emotional landscape. Around the world, inside a computer, and back out to the far reaches of space.

It works on a flat screen, even if the start and stop nature of its levels become more apparent there as breaks between each level make it harder to stay in the flow during a session. But Journey is built for VR. Inside a headset, you are enveloped by it. Crystalline serpents clash in your peripheries. An airport runway stretches for miles as planes zip in over your head to make their landing. The neon signs of a Japanese city burn bright in the night sky.

Every scene is a new vacation. Every session is a precious ray of light. Every song is an escape.

Now, let the synthesizers sing.

Image: Enhance

Electro-pop, hip-hop, industrial, jazz, teeth chattering on a cold night.

If Journey is Arise’s heart, music is its blood. It brings all that spectacular imagery to life. Thick percussion set the tempo of play. You’ll instinctually drop blocks on beat as the bass drum beats into you. The music can be unnerving to fit its eerie backdrops. It can be ephemeral to match its otherworldly ones.

And it can be corny, too.

A handful of songs feature on the nose lyricism that takes the abstract images literally. A jungle level is backed by a rap about jungles. “Rain on a cloudy day won’t stay,” a soulful singer croons as silhouetted figures dance with umbrellas. Other sung songs try to stretch melodies to fit awkward rhymes, or ape sentimental artists like Coldplay to claw up towards emotional heights. In The Cynical World, I’d label it cringe.

But Lumines Arise does not exist in The Cynical World.

It exists in its own world far away from this one. A place that remembers what it’s like to feel hopeful, a place where optimism is welcome, a place where there is no separation between ground and sky. There are no ceilings here. There is only light.

“You and I deserve to live this life,” a voice sings. “We will get through every fight.”

I wouldn’t accept this affirmation in The Cynical World. It would just be another thing to fuel my spite. I’d rip the sentiment apart and point to any number of atrocities unfolding every day around the globe. I would be snide and snippy, because cynicism is a currency. But when Lumines Arise’s songs speak these words, my guard drops. I am, for a moment, comforted by the thought that there is still a sun in the sky, even when I can’t see it through the concrete above me.

Image: Enhance

Every morning, I wake up in The Cynical World.

I struggle to find joy.
I struggle to find hope.
I struggle to survive.
But every morning, I get out of bed all the same,
Awoken by the sun peaking through the curtains.
Stone will erode. 
The cracks in my ceiling will only grow larger with time,
Until the structure begins to crumble altogether. 
When it finally collapses, 
There will be nothing left between me and the light.

Lumines Arise is out now on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on both platforms using prerelease download codes provided by Enhance. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.