Pentix

Falling blocks. You know how this ends — just like every Tetris clone since the mid-eighties. And yet. Pentix promises something on the box along those lines: take the few corners left from the original game and build something of your own on them. Sounds like the last breath before Tetris becomes the killer of all variants.

It's a simple machine for pentagons — five-piece blocks instead of the four-piece ones. The world won't change, just expand. They fall from above, rotate, you cram them into rows. When you complete a line from bottom to ceiling, it vanishes. Score climbs up, the game accelerates, until everything gets away from you. It's not the only way to take Tetris and add a quart to it; but seeing it in MS-DOS in 1986 means someone had the guts to try it on computers that enjoyed it for a moment.

Controls are a thing of the distant past — arrows, spacebar, a few keys — but it plays well. No unnecessary physics, no animation padding. Just block, grid, and time. No pixel dances, no sounds like from a vaporizing switchboard. Pentix knows what it wants: to be fast, clear, and relentless. And it succeeds. The problem comes when you realize there's nothing here that tells you why you should play again once you're done.

Retro games keep their honor because they had something to them. Pentix is no exception in that sense — it's just not enough. When you compare it to the original Tetris or later interpretations that had ambitions, Pentix stays as an ungrateful exercise. Right idea, wrong time, wrong place. An honest copy for its era, more of a curiosity for today.

If you're curious what the cloners were up to when Tetris could be counted on the fingers of one hand, Pentix is the answer without much surprise. You can play it in a browser for a few minutes, and then you realize that from the time when it was new, only the shell remains. But at least it was an honest shell.