Thanks to a Twitter post from @aurahack I saw TETRACHROMA, grabbed the demo and I played like 3h of it this evening. It fucking rules, it takes some getting used to when you're used to Regular Tetris but when it clicks oooooohhhhhh you feel like the smartest genius on Earth, really solid stuff already. And the soundtrack is great, big Tetris CD-I vibes all around.
for the unaware, this particular style of reversi-inspired falling-block game has been done before—specifically, by Jaleco's 1992 arcade game Soldam:
The above video focuses solely on the versus mode but it also offers a traditional endless mode and a stage-based mode with enemies of sorts and gimmicky blocks and so on. Being neither a Tetris-like nor a Puyo Puyo-like might force one to have to spend a little time with it before it clicks, but it's certainly not a complex or hard-to-grok game; of all the similar games of this vintage that I've introduced to other more casual players, it might be the one that grabbed the most people.
I don't point this out to discredit or diminish Tetrachroma, ofc—you're not getting anything truly original out of this game format in 20XX, and anyone working to come up with novel rulesets is destined to find at least one existing permutation of their ideas if they choose to go searching for it—but to simply let people know they can scratch this itch right now if they want to. The arcade version got a commercial reissue on PS4/Switch via Arcade Archives, if you'd prefer, and Jaleco catalogue custodians City Connection produced a modern version for the launch of the Switch that has online multiplayer and so on. (That version was published globally by an early limited-print publisher that ended up going MIA; it's still on the eShop, if you feel like throwing your money into a black hole.)
