Chime was a game that caught me by surprise, as it was released with very little fanfare on XBLA. This puzzle game melds a Tetris like aesthetic with soothing music to make one of the most addicting puzzle games of the generation. Not to mention you get an Achievement for buying the game worth 50 points because 60% of the profits go to charity.

One of the trickiest parts of Chime is trying to describe it, if you imagine a large grid on which you place shapes, of which you can place anywhere and have direct control, to create a 3x3 or larger block. Once the block is created it slowly begins to fill in with colour, before it fills up you can expand the block by adding an extra side e.g. making a 3x3 block into a 3x4 block and the block begins to fill again. The only limit to how large your blocks can become is the size of the grid.

Once the block is filled with colour it remains solid until the music bar contacts the block. The block then turns into Coverage on the grid, this just increases your coverage on the map and these sections are still available to place your shapes Looking at some of the shapes that need to be placed you can see that these blocks are very rarely going to be a nice cube. These fragments that are left over are very important to get a high score, after each pass of the music bar the fragments get weaker. Once you loose a fragment, they all disappear and you lose any multiplier bonus you have.

Below is a video tutorial released on the game, it is very informative and provided very useful to me.

This seems like a lot to keep track of, but once you learn the game and what the visual indications are alluding to it is so easy to sit back and play. Loosing an hour or two into Chime is an easy thing to do thanks to the soothing music created by a different composer for each level. While the game is meant to be tied to the music, it really struggles to show me any reason why. The music bar moves at a constant rate and this is what sets the pace for the game.

The game seems very bare bones as the only modes are a 3, 6 and 9 minute mode and a free mode. During the timed modes the point is to get the largest coverage area and the highest score, where as the free mode is only about getting coverage in the best possible time. With only 5 grids (each grid has a different set of shapes to use) it is easy to write the game off.

If you are thinking that, don’t. Tetris is a simple concept that was completely addicting, how many times have you sat down to play for 5 minuets and it ended up being half an hour. This easily happens with chime as you start to settle into your grove and the initial feeling of confusion is gone. As a puzzle game that is the biggest compliment I can give it.

While the game has a few minor gripes such as the help menu not being helpful and the visual queues for the disappearing fragments aren’t very noticeable it is an extremely addicting and fun puzzle game. For a game that costs 400ms points in this day I think that everyone who ever enjoyed Tetris needs to at least give Chime a try, you might get hooked.