Brainbow

Brainbow is an interesting color-themed Tetris-like game made by our coding wizard Kazesui.

I am a fan of puzzles, a fan of soothing tetrisish games and a fan of fresh ideas, and Brainbow has all of those elements.

Blocks made of 2 to 4 pieces fall in a Tetris manner. Each block is made of one single color: red, blue or green. There is no rotating. When the block lands, it spreads its color to the nearest blocks. If the blocks are of the same color, they remain unchanged. If the blocks have similar colors, they don't change much. If they have less similar colors, they change more, always getting whiter. When they get completely white, they disappear. Your goal is the same as Tetris: make sure the blocks disappear before the screen is full.

The concept itself is very charming; I love game mechanics that deal with color. The game plays very smoothly and bug-free, which is essential for this type of game. I enjoyed Brainbow a lot. This is a game I could see myself playing every now and then to pass time.

Apart from those basic mechanics I mentioned, there is one major difference between Tetris and Brainbow: the second one is more intuitive. Since a great number of pieces change color when one block lands and there are actually lots of different possible colors, it's impossible to know exactly what the effect of a landing block will be. You never know the exact outcome of your actions, you don't know in fact how many pieces will disappear, if any. It's not that it's impossible to predict, but the information is too complex to be processed within the game's rhythm, at least on a purely conscious level. So you have to follow your intuition, which adds a difficult yet fun dimension to the game.

I noted that the intuitive factor lowered a bit after a few plays, I got more skilled at predicting the outcomes of my possible actions and thus knowing what the best place to land a block would be. My basic rules were:

1- If the block is blue, land it in a yellower area;
2- If the block is red, land it in a greenish-bluer area;
3- If the block is green, land it in a pinker area.

I'm saying "areas" and not pieces, because, like I said, the colors spread to all near pieces, not just adjacent ones.

Like Tetris, as the game progresses, the falling of blocks gets faster, until eventually you can't hold it anymore and loses. At a faster pace, making a color assessment of the screen is much much harder. I change my basic rules to:

4- Move the block to fill the holes;
5- Move the block as far away as possible to same-colored blocks.

If it's TOO fast, only rule 4 will apply.

A few things I didn't like about this game:

- The moving panorama is annoying and distracting;
- The speed increases too fast, so you're bound to get a game over too soon;
- I'm don't quite understand the learning curve of this game. My first score was 29942 and my second one was 52090, but my third, fourth and fifth score were somewhere between 20k and 30k. I didn't feel like I was getting better. Or maybe the random factor of which blocks will fall play a role too big.

Nothing major, though.

Brainbow is a fun clever game, and I recommend it to all Tetris lovers.

PS1: My best score: 87496
PS2: Sorry for the tasteless pun on the title, I was uninspired.