What a great idea 👍

Great job !

therapist: "Opposite Tetris isn't real. It can't hurt you."
Opposite Tetris:

Great idea !

Based Pico 8. Very cool take on tetris and the theme. Really hard to wrap my head around though, but that's just a skill issue.

@oxnh thanks! It takes some time to master, even for us that made it 🙈

I love your game! I found it a bit counter-intuitive to keep soil connected, but overall it is an interesting game.

Really good idea and nice implementation. I would love if the game showed a preview of where the piece would end up since it was kind of a mind-bend to figure it out quick in many cases. But thats the only thing I would add :)

@rinevard thanks! the mechanic takes some time to click while playing. Passed that point it gets more addictive

@daandruff it was like that originally! The problem is that, because you can slide pieces from the side and skip the first row(s), there's more than one way of placing the same piece with the same rotation in the same column (hope that's not too confusing to explain).

just like the comment above, keeping the soil connected was a bit weird, especially when digging the deepest square on screen led me to loose, but overall, fun and interesting !


I gotta give it up: I didn't think I ever wanted to play another "what if Tetris, but..." game in my whole life, but this is clever as hell. Great concept, great fit for the theme.

I kept going back and forth as I was playing: is this just Tetris? Like, does it have the same strategy as Tetris, just with a different perspective? No way, right? I mean, you can phase your pieces through the board. And I feel like I'm much better at this game than I am at Tetris. But then why do some moves *feel* just like Tetris?! This game's like a Zen koan and a magic trick at the same time.

@caeonosphere you're hitting the nail in the head. That's been our same experience even after the jam. I think part of the mindset is similar to tetris: rotating things in your head, keeping an eye on the next piece... and interestingly the tetris stick is equally a saver here

But the overall gameplay is completely different. Congrats on the 26 meters!! As a tip, you can use the secondary button (X in the keyboard) to save one piece in the Hold corner, and use X again to swap it with the current one. The fact that you reached 26 meters without using it is quite impressive 👏

@airgameboys Yeah, I only realized there was a Hold when I looked at my own screenshot. I thought I could try to pass it off as a flex instead of ignorance. :D

Oh, you know what would be cool? If you were allowed to create disconnected pieces, but only if they're the exact shape of a Tetris piece, and then you could get even more points by getting rid of it.

Amazing job. Great and fresh take on the theme and Tetris game. Love it. Gj

@caeonosphere that was actually the initial version of it! We had to decide between (a) allowing disconnected tetrominos, (b) not allowing any disconnection or (c) adding also 3, 2 and 1 sized pieces to make every size possible. We discarded (a) because it was too confusing for the new players (even the current way is a bit confusing at first) and (c) because it made the game progress too slow. But probably some nice tutorial would do the trick. Thanks for the detailed feedback!

@meskaline Thanks!!

Since pieces only destroy the dirt when they're fully covered you can get some pretty weird shapes and that's funny i think. This is a pretty good take on tetris.

Checkout this vaguely among us shaped hole.


This game was such a brain tease, I struggled to grip how it works at first, I thought I could outsmart the game and just hold down or only use certain pieces but nope! The dev thought about everything lol. I like the idea and the execution, ++ for pico8

awesome tetris variation, stylish visual

I spent like an hour or so playing it. Awesome! As comments says — Brilliant take on tetris!

As someone who loves playing Tetris, this game is absolutely amazing and my favorite entry so far! It's a game that I will probably play even after the jam is over, just because it feels so addicting and fun. Sometimes the Tetris muscle memory takes over for a brief second to ruin it all as I want to place the piece how you normally would, but that's on me.

Great job on the game, here's my high score so far:

I could've played on, but I accidentally pressed left one too many times.

This is brilliant and I'm not smart enough to get very far. Really messes with my brain in the best way possible.

Very very cool! Keep making stuff like this!

Very very clever twist on tetris!

Great idea, this proves Tetris can still get new original versions !

Interesting! It's definitely interesting

This is an awesome inversion of the Tetris formula! Really fun game, and great work!

Interesting twist on an already well-explored game. It took me some time to get used to the new rules, since while the game looks and feels the same as playing regular Tetris, the way you actually have to play is so different it almost plays like a completely different game entirely. I wasn't able to do very well in the short time I played, but part of that is probably just me having trouble shifting my brain away from the way I'm used to Tetris working. Good work overall.

Okay, first of all, this is a PICO-8 entry, so it's already a plus. I like that it's a twist on the Tetris mechanic, and quite clever at that. I sure suck at it, but I can see that there are going to be people way better than me at this.

It took me forever to even clear the first lines, because for whatever reason my brain didn't register the fact that the piece is registered only when covered completely by soil, but after that... uhh, no after that I was still sucking a lot. :sweat_smile:

But the entry feels very much complete. Loved the graphics, audio is awesome and the gameplay idea is very smart. Good job!

This is very smart, I couldn't get very far, but I loved the concept for sure. I had seen your post this morning and only now got to check it out, it was stuck in my head for a while x3

Very clever idea. Very addictive gameplay. Great job!

My best was 27. I'm not a very good Tetris player, though. The design is very clever! Well done!

I love it when people re-imagine classics in such innovative ways. Very nice take on the theme!

Great idea and better execution!

This became so addictive once I understood how to play! Thank you for making this game :gift_heart:


You guys are geniuses! Quite frankly, taking the simple, familiar mechanics of tetris and turning them on their head in destructive mode works really well: it's addictive, and it's a real brain-teaser when it comes to positioning your pieces correctly! The musical atmosphere works really well with the game, well done!

Once you get the hang of the gameplay, it works wonderfully, and you'll want to perform.
Congratulations!

Super nice game! Definitely a brain teaser. I had to play for a few minutes to really get the hang of it. Also, really smart how you worked the theme into this lovely Pico-8 game. Impressive work!

Found this one through a hackernews post surprisingly, super fun and polished game! I'm always amazed when people find new twists on Tetris

I didn't understand at all what to press, what is this button with the square?

@platonenko It can be a bit confusing at first, but that's basically how all Pico-8 games handle controls: the square and X are the two main Pico-8 buttons, which map to Z and X on keyboard, to the main buttons on gamepad, or to those touchscreen icons on mobile devices

@ everyone else: thanks so much for the kind words!! I think of the gameplay of this game as a happy accident. We first had the idea, then added the disconnection constraint while testing out, and it was magically a fully fledged emergent game experience!

I always like the idea of taking a well know premise and flipping it on its head and Sirtet is no exception. The idea of the game seems simple enough but oh boy is it hard, the best I could get was 7m.

This is definitely a case of "opposite Tetris" as @chloew said. It took a while for me to wrap my mind around, but there's a neat little puzzle hook. The presentation is great; Pico-8 was a good choice, and making it look vaguely GameBoy was a nostalgia hit I didn't know I needed.

Good job!

A great idea to take a classic and adapt it so well to the theme. Plus, it's a welcome change from the usual Tetris games.
Well done!

Fun twist on Tetris!

I was a bit confused at the start which blocks would disappear; I think I would have liked to see the shape in the end location for a tiny moment before the earth blocks disappear. To make it more clear that the block continues until it's fully covered.
Once I got that, I got to 39 meters. :smile:
I would have liked it if up arrow would also mean turning the piece, since I am used to that :wink:

Fun retro looks and sounds. Well done! :clap:

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Update: I played once more and got to 41! :smile: Also, I just realised the name of the game is Tetris spelled backwards, hahaha :laughing:


Brilliant! What a great adaption, really had me thinking!

Very fun twist on Tetris!

I really like Tetris and so I was immediately curious how this variant would feel. I missed the controls I'm used to (e.g. from Jstris) where you get buttons to instantly drop and also ones to turn the piece the other way or to turn it 180 degrees... But I was glad at least the "Hold" was there ^^. It was an interesting challenge and some of the behaviour felt quite surprising, especially that the piece only removes ground once it is *fully* submerged.

The music was nice, the ground tiles with fossils + the excavation "depth" are a cute theme. Got to 37m :)

It's really hard. But it's a really good game overall.

This is incredible! Really fun idea and brilliant execution. Great music, too! Really hard though, but that just adds to the classic game feel.

It was hard for me, but at the same time it was a lot of fun.

Simple, hard, addictive and made with pico-8. Love it!
Already made it to 23 meters.

Thanks for sharing the link to your submition. Was fun being able to play it. Not really my cup of tea, but I like the out of the box idea!

Definitely an unexpected surprise! Ok, I was just getting used to the covered-in-soil blocks without creating "holes". But then hitting the bottom kind of feels way too punishing. In regular tetris you lose in just one way. Here - multiple xD which may as well use the game name *Punishtris*. :smile:

Just a miiiinor idea: why instead of the GAPS that kill you, not make soil FALL DOWN? Not just a physics element.. but actually makes a real-world connection :p and would make players be able to stay longer (I know from experience there is a fine line between difficulty and actually putting off players since the difficulty was introduced too early or before they get better at it). :peace:

Very addictive ! It's such a good idea !!

@aweskybear thanks for the review! if that was the case, the game would be effectively infinite, you'd only have to place it wherever it's higher

Awesome! :clap:

Everything works very well, the gameplay is fun, the difficulty is perfect, loved your entry, great job!

great difficulty level! I'm hooked. really really solid!

from a pico lover : Well, it's simply brilliant... honestly, everything is there... the only problem for me is to make people understand what to do and to make the difficulty more progressive by putting at least a tutorial mode, but in jam mode it's completely normal... bravo, it's great and super well done

I... did not get a high score lol

Fun game, it's Tetris, but different enough that it made my brain hurt from all the "I think I know what I'm doing bu then oops, I left a gap and game over". The music fit really well, graphics were definitely cohesive, and who doesn't like Tetris, especially with a new twist on it?

Great entry, fun game, awesome job!

one of my fav entries