Block Out is a three-dimensional falling-block puzzle game, originally designed by Polish programmers Aleksander Ustaszewski and Mirosław Zabłocki and published on home computers by California Dreams in 1989. This version is the arcade release, published by Technos Japan Corp. in October 1989. Instead of Tetris’s flat 2D well, Block Out drops polycube shapes into a deep rectangular pit that you view from above, turning the familiar stacking puzzle into a real spatial-reasoning challenge.
How to Play
A polycube block falls slowly through the 3D pit. Move it left, right, forward, and back to line it up over the gap you want to fill, and rotate it around all three axes to orient it correctly before it lands. Whenever you complete a full horizontal layer of the pit with no gaps, that layer clears and everything above drops down a level — clearing several layers at once earns a bigger bonus. The game keeps going as the pit gets more crowded and the blocks keep falling, ending when the stack reaches the top.
In the browser, use the arrow keys to shift the block across the pit, dedicated keys to rotate it around each axis, and a drop key to send it down faster — check the in-game control screen for the exact mapping, since a 3D piece needs more inputs than a standard 2D puzzle game.
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