N.B. If you’ve not played Coloris, I highly recommend looking at a video or a few screenshots of it before reading this article.
I like a good match-3 game. When I was running through the Bit Generations and Art Style games a while ago, Coloris become a personal favorite of mine. I had a solid amount to say about it at the time, and gave it a very respectable B tier in the tier list. I don’t disagree with my placement, and I think the game is quite fun. It’s a solid entry in the series and lands its simple aesthetic perfectly. But at the same time, I really want to get into the weeds on this one. And there’s definitely some weeds to talk about.
Coloris’s aesthetic is as such: squares of various colors. These squares have an animation that plays separately for each square depending on specific game conditions that I will get into. The simplicity extends to the soundtrack, which is very much more sound than music. I think all of this fits together pretty well, especially during Score mode and the Basic levels of Clear mode.
During the mentioned modes, there is no background audio. Everything that plays is based on player input only. In the Advanced levels of Clear mode, they add two things: a background drone, and a background. The squares and animations can also be more unique and visually complex in Advanced Clear, which makes for some very pretty levels. I think this is a good idea, but as a man who has played Lumines, something feels like it’s missing.
Lumines does a similar “every level looks different” tactic with its Skin system, but it also goes the distance and includes audio in this equation. Besides the background droning, the Advanced Clear levels in Coloris make no such changes, and that background drone is the exact same in every Advanced Clear level. This doesn’t feel like a missed opportunity or a time restriction, just a choice to keep things simple, but I think it was a bad choice. It makes the Advanced levels feel a tad flat.
At the same time, this isn’t a huge issue. It still works, it’s nice to look at, and the block animations break up the monotony in a way that makes it so audio isn’t needed for that purpose. The Advanced stages are pretty. It looks great. They did a good job over at Skip.
The game has you change the color of certain pieces by “moving” them across a gradient. Match-3 games already use color as the main thing to match, and colors in an artistic sense are very easy to combine, merge, and change. It’s a beautiful combination of ideals. Having the difficulty increase be partially based on including more colors just makes sense, as there’s a lot of colors that exist and it feels like an organic extension of the original idea, even when the jump from gradient to color wheel happens. It’s just a natural way to design it. It makes sense.
I also don’t dislike the game’s built in penalties. If you make a color change that has no logical sense or a specific square lives for too long, it’ll turn gray. These gray squares prevent progress in multiple ways and act as annoying obstacles that prevent your colorful journey through the game. This works from an artistic perspective and it works from a mechanical perspective, and also allows there to not be too much UI on the screen because it’s diagetic to the board.
This game has terrible contrast issues that are built into the concepts already explained. Here’s a list of examples:
The five color form of the red-yellow basic palette has two reds that are hard to tell apart, and this gets used multiple times. It’s particularly bad in Advanced 13, because the digit-shaped tiles are much harder to tell colors apart with compared to solid squares.
The five color form of the yellow-green basic palette is also difficult to tell apart. Weirdly, this issue also pops up in a few four color Advanced stages despite there being only four colors in those stages.
Advanced 9’s lightest color is difficult to see against the background, which makes the board hard to parse.
Advanced 15 has two purples that are generally hard to tell apart at a glance.
Basic 15 and the Advanced levels that use its palette are the peak of this problem. The entire orange to yellow-green spectrum is immensely easy to mix up, and the purple side of things isn’t super easy to read either.
This is a complete non-starter for a lot of people. If you’re colorblind in any direction, you just can’t play Coloris. I mentioned this in the original tier list as a side note, but it’s worth mentioning now. This game concept is entirely unapproachable to a pretty sizable audience and it’s wildly unfortunate because it’s very, very cool.
But even ignoring colorblind people, this just kinda sucks. Some game development circles will point out that accessibility concerns are as helpful for those who are abled as they are for those who are disabled, and I think this game’s color choices are a perfect example of that. I’m not colorblind, and I still struggle with telling certain pieces apart. This happens throughout the game and it never really gets easier. Other match-3 games fix this by having each piece color also be a different shape, but the color is the whole point of Coloris so that just wouldn’t really work here.
Gray blocks appear if you make a color change that’s illogical or if you play too slowly. The first is easy to avoid: you just don’t do that. However, the speed in which you should play can seem very arbitrary. This is because the animations the pieces show are your timer. Each piece has its own timer before it turns gray, which is set backwards when they’re cleared, something next to them is cleared, or they’re transmuted into a different color. When a piece is close to turning gray, the animation speeds up. If something’s moving faster than it should be, it’s time to take action on it. Conceptually, this works and should be noticeable.
Unfortunately, the animations are played on every block the entire time. After a few moves the animations fall out of sync with each other, so it becomes pure visual noise. Unless I’m directly focusing on a specific block, I can’t tell when something’s playing faster because everything’s already moving whenever it wants to, so I just have to play quickly and hope it works out. Sometimes you do notice it, but other times a block just decides to be gray and now it’s your problem to deal with. The other thing is that you have to avoid making illogical color changes, but that only applies in the tri-color levels where the cognitive load is as hard as it gets and the color differentiation is at its worst. This makes the animations even more difficult to focus on, and eventually you just get jumpscared by gray blocks no matter what you do. At high enough difficulties on Clear mode, that means you have to reset the level. You’ve already lost.
Oh yeah, the cognitive load thing. That’d be weird to mention once and never again. We should talk about that.
The small problem is that this is just hard to do. Color differentiation is a notably hard problem for our brains to solve, and this is a game you’re supposed to play at speed. But more than that, the specific transmutations are very rough to solve. This is absolutely part of the appeal for me, but it also makes certain palettes feel notably clunky, for a lack of better words. As an example, Advanced 12’s sky-blue to maroon gradient feels like the purple middle point is its own color you can transmute to, rather than the mid-point of the gradient that it actually is.
The blue to turquoise to green part of the latter tri-color levels also feels wrong. That’s not a gradient, that’s three separate colors. This is exacerbated by the rest of the gradients being such smooth transitions that they can be hard to tell apart, as discussed earlier. I have to have a chart open or else I get obvious moves completely wrong because blue and yellow feel like they don’t connect properly.
At a certain point, it’s more frustrating than fun. The hardest levels in the game aren’t that enjoyable, and I think it’s a design issue rather than anything else. That’s a rough thing to have happen. It kinda sucks when a game is bad, but it feels way worse when the game starts good and goes sour, and in this case it’s even more than that because this is how the natural progression of the game would go if anyone were to design it. Of course you’d have to swap through the full color wheel at the end, it just makes sense! But it doesn’t work.
All of this adds up to an experience that just...doesn’t. There’s no better way to describe it. It just doesn’t. It feels like it should, but no matter how you look at it, it won’t. It’s not quite there and it’ll never really get there.
I don’t dislike this game, but I can’t exactly say it’s a good game even if I’ve enjoyed my time. It’s mechanically solid, but every mechanic works against the visual style and every bit of the visual style is required for the mechanics. It’s like if you put oil and water in a blender and never turned the blender off. I think if this launched on Steam today, it’d get reviewed as “mixed” and it’d be deserved. It’s a somewhat interesting 6/10 at best.
Hey, Cublex, this is an absolutely terrible conclusion.
Everything I’ve said here is correct. I’m not lying about anything, I’m not even overstating any of my experiences for comedy. But analyzing Coloris as a gameplay-first videogame is misleading. In my original tier list article, I stated that “[The Bit Generations and Art Style games are] audio-visual experiences first and videogames second”, and I stand behind that. Analyzing Coloris’s gameplay and how it meshes with the visuals isn’t super conducive to the point of the series because it’s second fiddle to the things they’ve put in front of your eyes and ears.
That part of the game is wonderful, especially in the more elaborately designed Advanced stages. I could live in Advanced 10. The calm blue and green color scheme, the quiet drone, the block animation showing a raindrop hitting a puddle in the most simplistic of ways, the satisfying noises on color transmutation and match making. The block animation is especially noteworthy; once you’ve made some progress through the level and disrupted the sync of the animation between blocks, it gives a simulation of a rainstorm that feels emotionally correct even if it’s not visually accurate.
The animation on each block being in sync reminds me of looking out the window of a glass sliding door from a supermarket while it’s raining. The chaotic, out of sync block animations as you solve the level feels like walking back to the car with my groceries, trying to find any way to avoid the droplets. Will running help? How can I make this board position work? Should I hold this bagged loaf of bread over my head as an umbrella, or will that ruin the bread? Is there a way to combo these blue blocks if I match those green ones? Could I walk sideways to avoid getting my face and glasses wet due to the direction of the wind? What’s the most effective way to trigger this powerup block? The satisfying level complete audio and animation matches the feeling of being back under cover and out of the weather perfectly. It’s a beautiful experience, both in Coloris and in real life, and in Coloris I don’t have to get wet. That is the key part of this game.
It’s not about the gameplay. The gameplay is a vessel in which the audiovisual experience of the Advanced levels get to shine. Maybe they’ll just look neat, maybe you’ll get to relate to them like I have with Advanced 10. Because of this, I think that the gameplay being rough around the edges is perfectly fine. It suits the theme of the game, it gets the job done, and it manages to be engaging even if it’s not quite in the right ways towards the harder levels.
The audiovisual style, the part that matters the most, is gorgeous. I don’t think you could do it any better on the GBA. At its highest points, it’s somehow closer to Tetris Effect than anything else. I want to nitpick that the levels don’t have unique audio, but I don’t think they need it. I see both the mundane repetition and the once-in-a-lifetime beauty of life in the Advanced levels, and having all the audio be the same fits that interpretation to a capital, bold, italics, Times New Roman T. In my mind, this game does the Lumines experience on GBA better than Luminesweeper, the actual Lumines clone made for GBA.
Bit Generations: Coloris is a good videogame. You should play it, I think. As long as you’re not colorblind.