I need to explain how extraordinary, how facile, how effective this game is by telling you about a bit of tetris theory.
Imagine a grid with a checked pattern, alternating black squares and white squares. Now, place a transparent tetromino on top of the grid: how many white squares and black squares will be under the piece? For the O, L, J, S, Z, and I pieces, it's pretty clearly two white squares and two black squares (let's say, 2/2 for short). But when you place a T piece on this grid, it takes up three of one color and one of the other (3/1). This property is called "parity," and the T piece's 3/1 parity helps to confer its "jaggedness," and its difficulty to place. And parity is the exact property that the developers of Retris exploit to build their challenges.
Even the simplest piece you can drop in Retris has a 2/1 parity. By putting literally anything down, you are already invoking terrible jaggedness. Failure starts from the jump. Two of the pieces have 3/0 parity, like, these are completely messed up to stack and difficult to balance. The developers give you this very simple limitation that spreads like poison throughout your stack -- AND THEN gives you unholy superpowers: pills (to delete next pieces) and the hard drop (to clear extra pieces). With every piece added, you poison your stack; with every hard drop or pill, an irregular antidote tries to kill the problem.
What results from this tension is a truly fascinating, mysterious, exact, and engrossing experience. The small visual design touches remind me of the DOWNWELL: like good writing (i.e. unlike this review), only exactly what is needed to say is said. Beyond it yawns a blank silence, inviting or threatening you either way. To play Retris is to perish slowly inside a rotting computer, before being brought unceremoniously back to life and invited to die again. The texture of death seeps through every glitch, every soft neon glow, every bended pixel, every wondrous silence inside the soundtrack.
I play a lot of puzzle block-dropping games, old and new, over a hundred at this point. Retris is easily top five. You will be sucked in -- not like the addictive smooth beckoning of Tetris, but with a jagged claw that drags you into this depths. I suck at this game. I *love* sucking at this game. I love that this game eats me alive. It's so damn good dude.
