The best and most chaotic way to play Puyo Puyo Tetris

Puyo Puyo Tetris turns five today. I think that perhaps few people will care about it – it’s really just Tetris with lots of colors and annoying characters – but for me, Puyo Puyo Tetris was the foundation on which my current relationship was built. Take me back in time to 2017 and I’ll tell you a story about love, tetraminoes and one chatty egg…

In March 2017, the Nintendo Switch was released. As I wrote earlier, at that time I was traveling the world, and at that time it became almost as important to me as my passport. In April 2017, Puyo Puyo Tetris was released, combining the hugely successful Japanese arcade game Puyo Puyo with the hugely successful Tetris Tetris game. Several new characters were created for the game, all based on Tetriminos – T, Ess, Ai, Jay, Elle, and so on – but the most important of all was O.

Oh is based on a yellow tetromino square, and unlike most of the other characters, he can only speak one word: “Pi”. Puyo Puyo Tetris characters have several lines that they say whenever they get a chain, tetris, or whenever someone else in multiplayer sends them trash. Many of these lines are… very strange.

Sig simply says the names of different shades of blue, such as “Cerulean!” and “Lapis Lazuli!” and Ess simply names various beauty products, from “Lip Cream!” to “Eyelashes!” If you often hear replicas, and all of them Indeed annoying…why not just pick a guy who can only say “wee wee”?

And when I first went to my partner in June 2017, that’s exactly what we did. This is what we are all did. Me, him, and two of his housemates would gather around the TV in the living room and we would all choose O, or Egg, and play competitive multiplayer. When someone got a line – wee wee! When someone has Tetris – pee-pee-pee-pee-pee! When someone sends trash to another player – angry PEEEEEE! Imagine that they are layered on top of each other. I promise it cheerful.

And it was also a real icebreaker. I get really nervous about new people, but games offer some much needed social lubrication, especially when said games get pretty hot and before you know it, you start trashing complete strangers like you’ve known them for years. And they were all SO GOOD at Tetris, so it wasn’t that embarrassing moment where you’re so much better than everyone else and no one is having fun. In fact, I almost never win, mostly because my partner is really good at T-spins and I just can’t understand them.

As of June of this year, we have been in a relationship for 5 years and since that first month we have played a lot of Puyo Puyo Tetris (and later Tetris Effect) as well as a lot of other non-Tetris games. Now we live together, and the housemates with whom we used to play games have all gone to their places – one still lives nearby, and the other lives in New York. We haven’t played Puyo Puyo Tetris since the pandemic started. It’s kind of sad! But it’s always there for us when things get a little more normal again.

As O would say: wee-wee-wee, wee-wee-wee, wee. (Thank you for such a great party game, Puyo Puyo Tetris.) Pi pi. (Wee wee.)