Game:

Lumines: Puzzle Fusion (2004)

Duration: 9:03

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12

In case you found your suspicions elevating as a result of how seemingly effortlessly I keep on passing each successive puzzle even after repeated assurances that they're getting trickier... the arrows notwithstanding, since they're pretty much collectively "one" puzzle with the most potentially treacherous of the lot placed first for whatever bizarre reason.

I must confess my own surprise at having encountered so little resistance on the one directing the construction of a solid 4x4 formation, because as much as that one is particularly daunting for requiring a lot of action in a single pass of the clear line (which exceedingly few puzzles do, I might add), it ALSO has the added distinction of being incredibly easy to botch even with a plan and quick fingers, because visualizing dropping two pieces into place is a fair bit different than actually doing it and what you think will happen and what actually does happen can reveal some surprisingly incongruous things.

But I digress... and all this brought on by my simply wanting to note how much longer the running time is for this than usual and the promise of some actual failure for a change and maybe a little bit of puzzling on the side!

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Puzzle Mode
Puzzle 16: Clear All

This one... I think this is probably my pick for the hardest puzzle overall, because the very nature of the game pieces and their randomization will not make the process particularly intuitive or even the sort of thing you'd be likely to pick up playing Lumines in... well, ANY of its modes.

That said, I do believe as a teaching tool, it is by far one of the best among this mode has to offer. Puzzle Mode is actually a surprisingly valuable experience already, teaching you how to judge the arrangement of pieces as you place them and what will become of the play area as a direct result... the problem is that most often, these are based on unusual or even useless constructions for normal play.

This time, however, the whole point is to build something that is completely lined up with the game's goal: to erase panels. The ultimate extent of this goal is to erase them all, no? Plus, you get really nice bonuses in score-based modes for clearing all the pieces away from the board... once for getting rid of one color entirely and again for the complete eradication of everything you'd previously placed there. The reaction thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and if you can do this, negating your footprint on the puzzle matrix entirely, then you can theoretically play forever.

Of course, as I said, this is hardly a trivial skill and it's definitely not the most intuitive ability to build... but it is the ultimate extension of everything Puzzle Mode has to teach us and furthermore the idealized illustration of everything we've (hopefully) learned.

Of course, trying to do all this organically and on the spot is pretty challenging without some exposure... and even then, it's hard not to feel like you're at the mercy of the drop queue if you live one reduction at a time... which is about my level of capability when it comes to trying to do this for real, so there's always more room to grow. But every successive piece is a new drop, clear, and/or drop (you heard me!) pattern to be absorbed, so there's nothing at all wrong with that.

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