Tetris Effect is more than the latest iteration of the classic puzzle game. The Playstation 4 exclusive promises something deeper than simple block-falling puzzle gameplay. Tetris Effect is designed as a synesthesia of animation, music and gameplay. Tetris plays out just like you remember it, but as blocks fall into place and you clear lines, the music syncs to your game. As you achieve combos of multiple lines cleared at once, particle effects and animations such as dolphins and jellyfish leap from behind the screen and dance across the board. This is familiar stuff to fans of Tetris Effect producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who also created the music rhythm games Rez, Lumines and Child of Eden.

The term "Tetris effect" refers broadly to a mental phenomenon where you have devoted so much concentration and time to a task that you begin to see ghostly vestiges of it everywhere. Tetris players are especially prone to this effect: objects in the real world -- cars, laundry, groceries -- seem to be able to fit together like tetrominoes, and falling blocks haunt the periphery of your imagination as you drift off to sleep. In one study -- as the moving trailer for the Tetris Effect game attests -- after play sessions, images of falling blocks haunted patients who suffered from amnesia and otherwise had no recollection of playing the game. The researchers in this study, from the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Harvard Medical School, suggest that Tetris memories are a different kind of memory altogether, akin to procedural memory.

While some of this doesn't sound particularly uplifting -- being haunted by rows of falling tetrominoes when you have no idea where they came from sounds like a Cronenberg nightmare -- the "Tetris effect" can also be interpreted as the after-effects of a prolonged "flow" state, a period of great concentration where distractions melt away and you become entirely absorbed in the task at hand. In other words, everything just falls into place. The achievement of a flow state has been a bit in vogue recently, thanks to the "mindfulness" movement, and why wouldn't it be? At a time when our phones have become corporate weapons of profit-driven distraction, and the news cycle threatens to plunge you into despair with every incoming alert, it's only natural that the collective desire for "flow" would increase.

There are dozens and dozens of self-appointed mindfulness geeks on YouTube who will walk you through tutorials to achieve flow states. Or you can turn to Tetris Effect, which contains a game mechanic called "Zone." As you clear lines in the Tetris matrix, it charges your Zone meter. When you release Zone, time freezes, giving you the opportunity to quickly disappear line after line of blocks. If you clear 16 lines in a row during one of these Zones, you will have achieved a "decahexatris," which is the ultimate play in Tetris Effect.

Researchers suggest Tetris play can be used to alleviate traumatic flashback memories when they occur.

Though the decahexatris is the holy grail players are searching for when they enter Zone, not everyone will achieve it. But what everyone will get out of entering Zone is a powerful taste at the elusive flow state. In this sense, Tetris Effect becomes an effective tool to hone your concentration -- you can enter Zone/Flow only after clearing several lines, which means you need to build up your concentration, which then gets rewarded with a mechanic where everything starts clicking into place. The game leads you here with a gentle hand. You can restart levels quickly and easily. Progress is steady and rewarding. The game wants you to improve, it wants you to find your flow. It wants you to train and flex your mental muscles.

Tetris has long been used as a psychological tool, since the very first years of its inception at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center in Moscow in 1984. One of the first people to play the game was psychologist Vladimir Pokhilko, who recognized it immediately as a potential aid in his studies of addiction. More recently, researchers from Oxford University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have found that playing Tetris after a traumatic event creates a dissociative state that prevents the formation of memories that could lead to PTSD. They suggest putting Tetris in emergency rooms to help patients turn off their active minds while awaiting treatment. Researchers also suggest that Tetris play can be used to alleviate traumatic flashback memories when they occur. This therapeutic power to heal broken minds may apply to other visually demanding games, but it seems uniquely applicable to Tetris, where the premise of the game is to bring order out of chaos and make things fit properly. And perhaps this has something to do with those Tetris memories being a different kind of memory.