Tetris. There’s a really good chance that I don’t need to explain it to you. You’ve got your pieces made out of four squares, you’re dropping them down a 2D plane and trying to line them up. It’s simple but fun and endures to this day. But what if they tried to make a 3D Tetris game? What would that look like, and would it be any good?

This is actually something that’s been tried a couple times. The first was 3D Tetris on the Virtual Boy, and then again with the subject of today’s post, Tetrisphere on the Nintendo 64. I never played the Virtual Boy one, but my understanding was it was literally the rules of Tetris applied to a 3D plain. Tetrisphere is not quite that, and honestly, is a little more confusing.

I started with the training mode. This taught me a few basics of the game. As the name implies, Tetrisphere takes place on a sphere with 3D Tetris pieces covering it. You need to drop pieces that are identical to the pieces already on the sphere in order to clear them. So, if there’s a square piece, you drop another square piece on it to clear. You can also move pieces around, but only if the current piece you’re dropping matches the piece you’re trying to move. This really doesn’t feel like Tetris, and at least in the amount that I played, I really only encountered square pieces and the long bar pieces. I don’t really see the Tetris connection from that.

The goal of the game is to clear blocks to uncover something hidden in the sphere. Depending on the mode, this could a piece of art or some kind of guy bouncing around. At the end of the day, which mode you’re playing doesn’t seem to really matter. You’re still doing essentially the same thing regardless.

Where things got really confusing to me was when I started playing the actual game after training. Sometimes square pieces just didn’t work with other square pieces. I don’t know if there’s a color element to this and my color blindness is just preventing me from seeing the difference in shades, but sometimes I would drop would looked exactly right, and then I would lose health. Oh yeah, if you don’t clear anything with a drop, you lose health. Lose all your health, and you lose. So yeah, I don’t know if there is some core thing that I don’t understand that was causing me to lose health, or if it’s maybe a color thing, but I didn’t get it.

It’s kind of a shame, because at its core, Tetrisphere seems like a perfectly okay little puzzle game. I don’t fully understand the Tetris connection, seems like they might have just used the name to sell a few extra copies, but it’s okay any way. I just wish that I understood what I was doing wrong, I probably would have liked it more if I did.