Someone built Tetris in Overwatch
In the year of our lord 2019, as games embrace embrace the power of community-driven Workshop content, they are all destined to become Tetris. I pin this on the spirit of Tetris itself, reaching out from the 1980s in an ongoing life or death struggle for cultural relevance. If Tetris was a character in American Gods they’d be smashing it.
Someone has used the Overwatch Workshop to recreate Tetris using, I think, Winston’s shield and some nifty programming skills. Oh, and also the Halloween mode kicked off last week. It’s fine. It’s not Tetris.
Reddit user Ochotonida uploaded the mode yesterday. Here it is in action.
You can play for yourself by creating a custom game, clicking settings, then the Workshop button, then the ‘enter code’ button at the top right, then entering the code “X236D”. It’s all very elegant. I’ve previously sung about turn-based Overwatch, and the joys of spaceships and weeping angels. With great power comes great flexibility, and I’m kicking myself for not keeping an eye on the wildest creations from the past 6 months. I’m fond of the incongruity, which is clearly the main appeal here. But I now see the Workshop has (of course) been used to create Wrecking Ball hamster races, which is just inherently great game design.
The Halloween event is the same Junkenstein’s Revenge mode from last year, jazzed up with a handful of new cosmetics. It ends November 4th.
It’s a shame that a company capable of giving players so much freedom also likes to curtail it when in their business interests.