Good luck clearing a single line in this cruel new version of Tetris

I love classic Tetris. I love Puyo Puyo Tetris. Tetris 99. Tetris Effect. While it hasn’t always been an easy journey, I’ve become good at all of these games, a product of the sheer amount of time I’ve sunk into them.

I say this all to introduce a new Tetris experience with a cruel twist: Schwerkraftprojektiongerät, from Stephen’s Sausage Roll creator Stephen Lavelle. This is a mind-bending game that’s testing my love of Tetris in all forms.

Using Google Translate, I’ve realized the name means something along the line of “Gravity Projection Device” in German — and yeah, that sounds about right. Schwerkraftprojektiongerät is Tetris, but you’re playing four games at once, each on a different angle. Gravity is upended, so blocks fall into each of the games from different directions. You can’t move a block without impacting each of the games ongoing at the same time.

Essentially, Lavelle heard you liked Tetris, so he put more Tetrises in your Tetris.

Here, this clip will help you understand:

Schwerkraftprojektiongerät has fully broken my brain — in both a good and bad way — and rendered my Tetris mastery null. The most lines I’ve cleared in my short Schwerkraftprojektiongerät career is three, and is was hard. There is so much conflicting decision-making going on during a game and it’s hard to comprehend it all at once.

QWOP game developer Bennett Foddy put it perfectly on Twitter: “This game nicely captures the feeling of trying to make choices that unsatisfyingly reconcile multiple competing interests or ideals — to succeed you have to give up on perfection in all areas. If could just as easily be titled ‘dilemmageraet.’”

(Dilemmageraet would translate to “dilemma device.”)

Schwerkraftprojektiongerät is a free browser game. Join me. I won’t stop until I’m consistently able to clear five lines. This game may break me, and yet, I still love it.