First-Person Tetris

The name of this falling-block puzzle reinterpretation isn't what it might immediately suggest, the player seeing a tetromino's approaching landing from the block's point of view -- a 1st-person perspective. What it does, however, is assert the primacy of the game piece's place in the game universe, boldly declaring, like in Cameltry years before: you shall not move me around the game screen; instead, the screen shall move around me. And so it does, like a nauseating amusement park ride, the active piece almost always sitting prettily in the precise centre of the screen while the room scrolls (or zooms, when the player decides to drop the block) past it vertically or horizontally.

To the eyes and ears, the game of Tetris presented is a pretty good reproduction of the basic play mode of Tengen's unlicensed NES conversion (or the Atari Games arcade machine informing it), gameplay happening in a little flickering TV window actually framed by a static rec room border of an NES and VHS player hooked up to an analogue (or what we might call non-HD) television set. This backdrop is important, because players will see a great deal of it lurching and swaying sickeningly in place of rotating falling pieces.

For those who find the room's twisting too distracting ("stop the world, I want to get off!"), the game offers a new option in the Tetris world, a "night mode" plunging everything into the dark save the glowing blocks on the screen.

By simply removing the constancy of "down", one anonymous developer's proof-of-concept has taken a game so fundamentally familiar people have dreams about it and rendered it more alienating than the explicitly sadistic variant demonstrated by Bastard Tetris.