2025 State of Play Debuts Lumines Arise – New Puzzle Game Trailer Breakdown
Lumines Arise kicked off the June 2025 State of Play presentation, and its flashy aesthetics immediately caught people’s attention. A play on Tetris, the game is an entirely new experience that takes the long-standing puzzle game and tackles it in an entirely fresh way. The game features fresh new mechanics that add layers to the gameplay, and 30 all-new stages that have players traveling across the world. The game even has an optional VR capability that allows players to be more immersed in the classic than ever before.
Lumines Arise Switching Up A 40-Year-Old Classic
Lumines Arise takes the idea of Tetris and turns it up a notch, with stunning visuals, a burst mechanic that adds a new layer to the puzzle game, and stages that bring players to more immersive depths than ever before. The game attempts to transport players into their flow state, in essence, the rhythm one feels through life’s highs and lows. The team behind the game ultimately hopes to take people out of their reality and fully pull them into the game, to evoke powerful emotions and a dreamlike quality.
In a PlayStation blog post, the team gives players insight into what to expect in the next game of the Lumines series. “Lumines Arise on PlayStation 5 with optional PS VR2 compatibility is more than just an ordinary puzzle game—our aim is to hit you right in the feels. You emerge from the darkness in the first stage (a glimpse of which you saw in today’s announcement trailer), and every stop on the over 30-stage journey evokes a different and complex emotional response. From lush jungles, oceans teeming with life, and snakes preparing to strike, to more electronic frontiers like the bustling streets of Tokyo and the endless expanse of outer space. All with visual flourishes to incite synesthesia.”
While Lumines Arise has a simple gameplay concept, there is a lot of complexity that actually goes into it.
It all starts with a seemingly simple puzzle mechanic. If you’ve never played a Lumines game before, here’s how it works: rotate and place a variety of 2×2 blocks made up of one or two colors, forming squares of a single color/pattern. The Timeline sweeps across the playfield to the beat of the thumping soundtrack, erasing completed squares in its path. That gives you a light time pressure to form squares and build on them, making bigger and bigger squares to clear combos and score even more points.
You race to create combos, ever mindful of the constant movement of the Timeline, feeling the vibration of the DualSense controller while the music radiates between your ears and the vibrant, lively background draws you in. That’s when you enter a flow state, and the world around you vanishes. Your pulse quickens as your breath holds still.
Lumines Arise also features an entirely new mechanic, called burst. Essentially, players will be able to build up a charging gauge, then use it in gameplay. This trigger releases a large square onto the playing field, which you then work to make as large as possible. When the timer runs out, it triggers screen-clearing combos that rack up points. Players can utilize this tp their advantage, strategically timing a burst so they can maximize their points and clear the level.
The full trailer of Lumines Arise can be found below.
Final Thoughts
Tetris has been an inspiration for so many different games over the years, and the similarities with Lumines Arise are quite evident. Still, Enhance has worked incredibly hard to bring a fully immersive escape into their puzzle world in a way that puzzle games rarely can achieve. The game does not have a launch date yet, but it can be wishlisted now and will release for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation VR 2.
