Last year, I played some difficult games. RPGs like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island put my skills to the test. While I found the Souls-inspired Black Myth: Wukong relatively easier compared to other games in its genre, some of the bosses still really gave me a hard time (looking at you, Yellow Wind Sage).
When December rolled around, I looked around for something more relaxing to play during the Steam Winter Sale. I just needed a cooldown. As I browsed the deals, I came across a new spin on the classic Tetris for just a few bucks: Tetrachroma. In this puzzler variant, it’s not just about clearing lines; colors have to match as well. The beauty of Tetrachroma is that it can be as easy or as difficult as you’d like, and it was the perfect game to wind down 2024 with.
Or so I thought. I wasn’t prepared for how challenging it would become at a high level. It’s an engrossing hidden gem that I still find myself coming back to in the calm early days of 2025.
Flipping the table
Tetrachroma’s puzzle concept is similar to Reversi, a Japanese board game. Placing different-colored pieces adjacent to a line changes the color of the line. Not only do you have to completely fill out a line but its color also has to be entirely uniform throughout.
Speaking to Digital Trends, developer Sparsevector (who chooses to remain anonymous) says that initial inspiration for Tetrachroma came from playing Reversi in Nintendo’s Clubhouse Games series. From there, he started playing a bunch of different Tetris and Tetris-like games to understand the genre. The biggest direct influence came from Tetris: The Grand Master, a fan favorite piece of the series’ history.
“I love Tetris fan games because they all differ in various details that give them each their own unique feel — stuff like the sounds or the visual effects when pieces lock,” Sparsevector tells Digital Trends.
Tetrachroma has many different gameplay settings, usually designated by how many colors there are. In the free play Spectrum mode, duochrome difficulty, where blocks come in two colors, and in trichrome difficulty, blocks come in three colors, and tetrachrome comes in four colors . There’s even a mode that just plays like straight up Tetris, called monochrome, where you don’t have to even match the colors in order to clear lines. This lets players get familiar with the block-setting seen in Tetris games before easing into Tetrachroma’s color-changing mechanics at higher levels. In the Marathon mode, there’s even the option to choose double-wide blocks for an extra challenge.
“I think Tetrachroma is challenging at a really fundamental level. The core mechanic requires you to think ahead,” Sparsevector says. “Until you develop an intuition for how the color transformations work, it can be very tricky!” As a result, he tried to be as generous as possible with the game’s control options, visual indicators, and difficulty settings to make sure players have all the tools they need to tackle the challenge.
As someone who doesn’t play many Tetris-like games, I admittedly had trouble getting a grip on the color-switching mechanic. I played many, many rounds of the monochrome setting to get the basics down first and I studied up on Tetris strategies. After getting comfortable, I eventually went up to higher difficulties, which meant applying the color-switching system.
What managed to help this entire learning process was the game’s aesthetic and soundtrack. It calmed my nerves whenever I felt frustrated when a round wasn’t going my way. Tetrachroma adopts a Y2K and vaporwave look that’s rather popular these days in music and fashion. Sparsevector sought a look at the was simultaneously retro and slightly artificial.
“I thought about how many Tetris players have nostalgia for the time they first learned to play Tetris,” Sparsevector says. “The game is not Tetris and doesn’t play how you remember, so I want the game to feel somewhat like a memory, but not your own.”
That style was influenced by beats artists such as Macroblank and Slowerpace, who typically take old and obscure music and turn it into their own edits and compilations. Their album artwork is often evocative, mixing traditional art with corporate logos, text in different languages, and bold color palettes. These include Macroblank’s The Eternity of Pain and Slowerpace’s Goddess of Light albums.
“The visual aesthetic also led me to the style for the game’s music, which is based around unconventional electronic versions of classical music,” he adds.
Sparsevector loves toying with simple mechanics and then building entire games around them. His next upcoming project, Jump Mechanic, looks like it’ll take his interests even further. In this game, players control a robot named J.Me that gets lost in a world of different game mechanics and keeps jumping to survive. I’m looking forward to it and seeing what he cooks up next considering how hooked I am on Tetrachroma.