I love this free Steam and PS5 demo for Tetris Effect’s spiritual successor

While several exciting games like Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance are coming out this week, if you have the time, you should check out the new multiplayer demo for Lumines Arise. It’s completely free on PC via Steam and the PS5’s PlayStation Store, and even includes the game’s multiplayer mode.

Lumines Arise is a spiritual successor of sorts to Tetris Effect, reimagining a cult classic puzzle game that first gained prominence on PlayStation Portable. We also now know when exactly the full game will be released.

When can you play the Lumines Arise demo?

And when will Lumines Arise launch?

The demo for Lumines Arise is available now, and you can play it any time between August 26 and September 3. It’ll give you a taste of the audiovisual experience ahead of its launch, which developer Enhance revealed is set for November 11.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lumines, it’s a musical block-dropping puzzle game. 2×2 blocks made up of differently colored squares consistently drop. It’s up to players to line squares of the same color up so they can combine into a singular, bigger block.

A timeline moves across the screen every few seconds and clears any of those larger blocks that have formed. Lumines Arise retains that exact core gameplay loop, but it adds a new mechanic called Burst that enables players to build up one large block and clear a lot of the game board.

Like Tetris Effect before it, Lumines Arise really leans into psychedelic visuals to create an entrancing puzzle game experience. Although Lumines is a more complex puzzle game than Tetris, Enhance’s approach to puzzle games still works wonders here.

If you check out the free demo for Lumines Arise, you’ll probably agree with me. It offers a pretty holistic view of the experience, even if it only contains a small portion of the final game’s content.

On the single-player front, there are three levels that players can play through back-to-back. Go through this a couple of times, and you’ll get comfortable with Lumines Arise’s unique puzzle game mechanics and hear a new song from musical artist Hydelic.

This demo also features a multiplayer mode called Burst Battle. It’s a best-of-three match where two players face off across games of Lumines, sending junk to the other player’s board as squares are cleared by the timelines. It got to play a little bit of this mode with others who had early access to the demo, and found that it offered a really intense twist on Lumines’ typical game flow.

This free demo is running during one of the busiest weeks for gaming in 2025, but if you’re a fan of score-driven puzzle games like Lumines or Tetris, then Lumines Arise is well worth your time.