I've played a bunch of other tetris titles before and I always loved the game in its different forms. But I think this is the tetris game I've always dreamed of. I'm someone who just likes to play marathon tetris without anything too crazy and this game delivers on that. It's really fast, I just turn on the gba and I'm in a game within seconds. But what really puts this over the edge as a masterpiece is the customization. You can kinda make the game look and feel exactly the way you want if you put the time into all the various settings and features. Changing colors, rotation, screen shake, etc. I can see this giving the game a ton of longevity. For once I really like the other modes as well. I very much appreciate the game mode with classic tetris rules, I often just play that to really shake it up. But the other various modes really test your skills in different and valid ways that are fun. This has been my definitive bed time game for a week now and I love it very much.

What is the best version of Tetris? Depending on the kind of Tetris you’re used to playing, the answer to that question will vary wildly. If you grew up on the rigid simplicity of NES Tetris, you might prefer to stick with that version. There’s a passionate cult of devotees for each iteration of Tetris the Grand Master, for those that love the intensity of a finely tuned competitive arcade experience. If you’re more into style over gameplay, perhaps you’ll gravitate to the proto-vaporwave aesthetics of Tetris for the Philips CD-i or the sensory overload of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Tetris Effect. If for some reason you wanna stack blocks but you also want to get horny, there’s even a pirate game for DOS platforms called Porntris. With all of these different versions of the tetromino stacking game out there, who exactly is Apotris for?

The homebrew title, developed solely by Game Boy Advance enthusiast Apostolos, aims to provide a little something for everyone via a truly staggering amount of customization. Whether you want flashy visuals or the most utilitarian options for clarity, Apotris has settings that are likely to work for you. Ghost blocks and grid views are available to ensure that you know exactly where your tetrominoes will fall, or you can take the training wheels off entirely if you’d prefer more difficulty. You can play a traditional marathon mode, a timed sprint mode in which you clear a predetermined number of lines (by far the best mode for practicing speed and building muscle memory), or puzzle modes for testing your problem solving in unconventional stacking situations. There’s even a classic mode if you’re not particularly a fan of modern Tetris mechanics.

Apotris doesn’t manage to capture all the possibilities of Tetris; that’s impossible. But it comes closer than anything else has managed. It’s most suited to speed demons that are accustomed to modern Tetris mechanics—so unique games like the Grand Masters, Tetris Effect, or Tetris 99 will always have their niche—but Apotris does what it does better than almost any other Tetris game released after 2001, when the standardized guidelines for gameplay were written. I find myself reaching for Apotris whenever I simply want to play Tetris. It’s hard to overstate how impressive it is to establish yourself as the most solid option when you’re competing with hundreds of different games.