PLAY PETRIS FREE
A falling-block puzzler for Game Boy Color where the blocks are pet parts — complete an animal to clear it from the board. 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 — You assemble small animals out of falling segments, which is either a puzzle game or unsupervised bioengineering. The pets seem happy. I have elected not to escalate.
CARTRIDGE: Petris — bbbbbr — CC BY-NC-SA (2020). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH GAME BOY COLOR 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 conscience: stack the falling parts until something with a face climbs out of the well.
Petris is bbbbbr's 2020 Game Boy Color spin on the falling-block formula, and it earns its pun. Instead of clearing lines, you assemble small animals from descending segments — a head here, a tail there — and a completed creature clears the board. It's a clever reframing of a genre that hasn't had a fresh idea in a while, and the GBC palette gives the critters real charm.
What it isn't is a reinvention. Underneath the menagerie it's still a tile-dropper, and the novelty does most of the heavy lifting; how long the assembly hook holds you is the open question. But it's clean, it's free under CC BY-NC-SA, and it's exactly the kind of polished single-idea homebrew the GBC scene does well. Worth a sitting if you like puzzlers with a personality.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Petris is a puzzle game built by bbbbbr and released in 2020 under CC BY-NC-SA — 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 for Game Boy Color where the blocks are pet parts — complete an animal to clear it from the board. You assemble small animals out of falling segments, which is either a puzzle game or unsupervised bioengineering. The pets seem happy. I have elected not to escalate. It is built for the Game Boy Color, the sweet spot of the handheld homebrew scene: friendly architecture, modern tooling, 32,768 colors. 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.
THE MACHINE ANSWERS
- Am I allowed to play Petris in the browser like this?
- Yes — and so are we. The author published Petris 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 Game Boy Color 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.
