Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s signature games blend synesthesia through art in a playable medium. From Rez to Child of Eden and the cult classic Tetris Effect, the rhythm and visuals work in tandem to create an experience unlike anything else. While this isn’t the first Lumines title, it is the first to build on the creative framework of Tetris Effect: Connected, both in terms of audio and visuals. Hands down, this was by far the one demo from Summer Game Fest 2025’s Play Days that I kept coming back to and thinking about long after my thirty minutes were up.
True to the long-running puzzle rhythm series, Lumines Arise focuses on the gameplay of dropping 2×2 squares built from two different colors and linking together matching colors in various squares. Both dropping the squares and linking them together result in musical notes and beats, letting the player remix tracks on the fly as they reach that puzzling nirvana. Each track has its own layers of color palettes and music, and, while the transitions aren’t as smooth as in earlier games, they blend from one song into the next once you clear a certain number of boxes.
Unlike previous games in the Lumines series, Lumines Arise is focused on the musical styling of a single artist: Hydelic, who longtime Enhance fans would recognize as the composer of Tetris Effect: Connected’s soundtrack as well. Speaking with one of the onsite devs, there aren’t currently any plans to bring in licensed artists like Mondo Grosso (who was the backdrop for one of the most memorable Lumines stages of all time). This gives Lumines Arise more of a criterion collection focused on a single composer who has a knack for nailing a wide variety of genres. While I don’t know the name of the track quite yet, one of the final demo tracks with a pair of chameleons headbanging to the bass drops had the best overall vibes of the whole session, with an energetic beat that gets elevated when you achieve a solid combo chain or Burst.
Fundamentally, Lumines Arise plays out similarly to earlier titles. To assist players with chaining together squares and creating flashy combos, Lumines traditionally has a single upgrade when dropped, will link and destroy every block of matching color that’s linked up and touched. This simple upgrade helps clear away trash and let a single matching color fall into place to hopefully create a chain of squares, but this is largely dependent upon player’s skill to have that foresight to link blocks together beforehand.
New to Lumines Arise is the Burst mechanic, a new twist that allows players to build up a meter over time and unleash a powerful Burst that essentially locks a square into place, permitting players to build on it and chain together larger and larger combos. As Bursts can be triggered any time once the bar is at least partially filled, it becomes a delicate balance between wanting to use the mechanic as often as possible versus saving it for a clutch moment when you want to skyrocket your combo count and potentially skip through a majority of a track you might not want to listen to (which in Hydelic’s defense, I couldn’t find a single track in my modest demo session that I wouldn’t mind hearing again and again).
Lumines Arise is one of those demos that kept lingering in the back of my head with the musical styling of Hydelic running through my thoughts with a few different renditions from the number of times I kept coming back whenever I had gaps in my schedule to get another run through the demo. In fact, my first playthrough of Lumines Arise’s hands-on demo finished in roughly seven minutes with an S rank, although I didn’t have the foresight to set up my capture card and record the run, so instead readers will have to settle for a not-so-smooth run captured below.
Lumines Arise is currently on track for a Fall 2025 release across PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR 2, and PC with a free demo available later this Summer.
