Connectris

Connectris? I'm hearing that name for the first time. And yet this is a game that deserves far more appreciation than it got in the late nineties — when only those with a spare moment between ICQ and Napster were actually playing computer games.

This mechanic isn't groundbreaking. Colored pieces fall down, you stack them into rows and columns. It looks like Tetris, plays like Tetris, but Connectris follows different rules. Your task isn't to align squares — it's more of a connection puzzle with logic elements. Pieces must link up with the right connectors, and the objective disappears from play once you've completed it correctly. The system is clear, but a bit unpredictable — both in good and bad ways.

It plays mechanically. The pace builds gradually, pieces fall faster, the board fills up. That classic "just one more round" is lurking here too, but Connectris makes you think more than Tetris does. Sometimes you're stuck without a move — the pieces just don't combine right — and you have to accept the end. The graphics are typical MS-DOS stuff from the mid-eighties — square pixels, green lines, no magic, just information. The sounds are more like distant failures than a feature.

In the mid-nineties, that was enough. Puzzle games without fanfare, without story, without hopes of becoming a bestseller. Connectris is only remembered by someone who glimpsed it during their PC teenage years and needed to kill time between classes or until evening when there was nothing better to do at home. It wasn't worth the money or the floppy disk — just one of those games that wandered off somewhere.

Today? Connectris is definitely not Tetris, but it has its charm. If you're curious how logic looked in a minimalist form and don't want to spend time on monsters like Puyo Puyo, you can fire it up in an emulator. You'll find a hardworking puzzle with no unnecessary pomp — exactly what you'd expect from a nineties puzzle game.