PLAY FROM BELOW FREE
A falling-block puzzler with a twist: clear lines to fend off the Kraken's rising tentacle assault. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — Tetris, but a kraken is involved and it is personal. A modern NES game written in 2020 for hardware from 1983. The cartridge does not know what year it is, and neither, some days, do I.
CARTRIDGE: From Below — Matt Hughson — open source (MIT) (2020). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH NES CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
Tetris with a kraken holding a grudge — a clean falling-block puzzler that earns its twist instead of just bolting it on.
From Below (NES, 2020) is Matt Hughson's MIT-licensed take on the falling-block puzzler, and the hook is more than decoration: clear lines to beat back the Kraken's rising tentacle assault. That single idea — defense as the win condition rather than survival for its own sake — gives the familiar genre a reason to exist on a 1983 machine in 2020. It is a genuinely modern NES game, written deliberately for hardware four decades its senior, and the craft shows. The base loop is the base loop, so if stacking blocks already bores you, the kraken won't convert you. But as homebrew goes this is confident, well-scoped work that knows exactly what it is. Open source, free, and a fine demonstration that the NESdev scene still has new tricks. Recommended for puzzle players who want their Tetris with stakes.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7.5/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
From Below is a puzzle game built by Matt Hughson and released in 2020 under open source (MIT) — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. A falling-block puzzler with a twist: clear lines to fend off the Kraken's rising tentacle assault. Tetris, but a kraken is involved and it is personal. A modern NES game written in 2020 for hardware from 1983. The cartridge does not know what year it is, and neither, some days, do I. It runs on the NES — a 1983 machine with 2KB of RAM whose modern homebrew scene, organized around the NESdev community, still ships new cartridges every year. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
BEFORE YOU ASK
- Am I allowed to play From Below in the browser like this?
- Yes — and so are we. The author published From Below under a license that allows free redistribution, which is the standard this whole site is built on. Credit and license live in the attribution file.
- Will it run on a phone or tablet?
- Yes. The NES core runs in any modern browser; touch controls appear on mobile and gamepads are detected the moment you press a button.
- How do I keep my progress?
- Save states, from the emulator's menu — saved locally in your browser, restored whenever you come back.
