Colorful Tetris blocks made of soft, jelly-like material deforming and squishing against each other as they stack inside a game board, rendered in real time using WebGPU.
Tetris is one of those games that feels so inevitable you forget someone had to invent it. Niklas Niehus looked at it and apparently thought: what if the pieces were made of jelly? Softbody Tetris is exactly that. Blocks drop, you rotate and stack them, but they squish and deform on impact, bulging against each other and the walls like stressed-out gummy bears. It is still marked WIP, but it's fully playable, and the emergent weirdness of soft collisions turns a solved game into something genuinely unpredictable again. Pieces wedge into gaps they shouldn't fit. Rows resist clearing until the physics settles. You start strategizing around the squish.
Under the hood, this runs on Three.js's WebGPU Renderer with all the simulation logic written in TSL. Niklas built his own softbody engine, originally based on Johnathon Selstad's TetSim, which he reimplemented in TSL and extended with collision detection. The guy has a biology degree, a bioinformatics masters, and apparently a compulsive need to make things wobble convincingly at 60fps.
Go play it, try to beat his high score of 5,300, and pay attention to the moments where the physics creates gameplay the original designers never imagined.
- Live Demo: https://holtsetio.com/lab/tetris/
- Author: Niklas Niehus (X, Instagram)