Entwined (PS4)

Entwined is a love story between two creatures who nature says should never meet. One, a fish locked to the waters, the other, a bird who must fly through the skies. While they can briefly visit each other’s domains, they can never truly spend long together, kept apart by the surface of the water. However, if their spirits are able to get in sync with each other, there is still hope for this pair of souls to finally join as one.

 

Entwined has you play as both the fish and the bird at once, the goal of the game being to bring the two together across the many different lifetimes of these two star-crossed spirits. While you’ll be controlling both creatures at the same time, the gameplay is surprisingly natural, mainly because the only controls you usually have to worry about are your PS4’s two analog sticks. With the fish controlled by the left stick and the bird by the right, you play on a screen divided right down the middle by an unseen line. Flying and swimming down an essentially endless tunnel, you move the fish around the edges of its half and the bird around its side to have them pass through gates that match their color, the fish assigned orange gates and the bird needing to pass through the blue. Sometimes, the two even need to get as close as possible to pass through the green gates that appear in the middle, although these seem to become more rare as the game goes on in what feels like a strange departure from the game’s idea of bringing these two together.

Rolling your sticks around the outside of the tunnel feels incredibly natural, the player easily able to slip into doing the required actions without thinking about them too much. To bring the two spirits together in a lifetime involves both sides collecting enough energy to perform the soul sync, the gates tied to the gradual accumulation of this special power. While there are little orbs floating about the two can collect for quick injections of the special energy, most of it will be earned by passing through the colored gates, these beginning with pretty large, simple, and stationary targets to pass through but growing more demanding as you make it further into the game. Their shapes begin to change, requiring more precision to pass through them when they aren’t just an aesthetic difference, and soon these will begin moving somewhat quickly so you need to track them to avoid missing your chance for more power. The game begins lining them up one after another as well so you have to glide your stick around the edges to have the fish and bird fluidly pass through them all successfully, the spirits losing power any time they miss their own gate or hit something they aren’t meant to.

 

The simplicity of the game’s demands makes this a game that’s fairly easy to slip into and relax while playing, but when the difficulty begins to climb, it can require a bit more attention or else you’ll be stuck in an endlessly looping stage. Since both spirits need to have full energy before they can activate the syncing process, it’s not too uncommon for one to be ready and the other lagging behind after it missed a gate or was slower on collecting the orbs. While it’s nice that the game won’t force a level restart if you mess up too often in the game’s main mode, energy accumulation can sometimes feel so slow that the levels start to lose their luster. There is an extra mode where you can play stages based on the five Chinese elements where too many misses will force a restart, which basically just makes you replay a stage with none of the energy you accumulated, so having the main mode be more forgiving isn’t truly a downside despite some stages feeling drawn out if you aren’t playing excellently.

The main body of the stages try to mix up the challenges about as much as they can without introducing any new elements to the formula, but once you have successfully synced the souls of the two spirits, the bird and the fish will finally be brought together, joining together as one and flying through the sky as a beautiful green dragon. It is a bit odd that bringing the two together involves a complete rejection of the sea in favor of sailing through the air, especially since these segments of the game are almost purely about experiencing the movement of the joined form rather than any additional layer of challenge. The game could have easily had you dive through the water and fly back out, but instead, you are meant to marvel at the little curated areas the dragon gets to soar through. You do still have to collect a bit of energy and then leave trails in the sky using it before you can move on, but it’s not much more than something to do since it’s not made challenging in the slightest. It could have been used as a way to guide you around these little areas a bit since they do often have some striking images like a carnival of lights, a sunset mesa, or an erupting volcano. Instead, you are basically free to fly as you like, but considering the game often prioritizes the visuals and sensations of the experience over the play, it’s not too much of a surprise these sections are devoted fully to celebrating the uniting of the two at the end of each lifetime.

 

For some unusual reason, Entwined has been classified as a rhythm game even though the music hardly seems to play a role in how you pass through the colored gates. There is some synchronicity between the gameplay and music at times, but not to the degree that you can follow them as a cue on how to move, the game instead relying mostly on its visual indicators and the play developing a greater flow in how to move the control sticks to hit multiple targets in a row. Hitting gates correctly does add a brief percussive burst to the music, but it’s not exactly in line with the rhythm either. You could say the player develops a bit of a rhythm to hit these markers, but the pacing of the stages feels like it moves as it pleases rather in deference to the dreamy soundtrack. Sometimes relaxing, sometimes full of energy, the sounds do match the gameplay in tone and build up appropriately as you push towards becoming the dragon, and the visuals can be absolutely gorgeous to match. Sometimes, the abstract shapes of the two spirits match the world around them, a place built more out of shapes and colors than identifiable objects, but across the lifetimes, you’ll fly over a beautiful river, through a frosty cave, and be surrounding by swirling rocks and heat. Most of it still feels ethereal before the dragon bursts out into a more worldly location, the graphics and music pairing together into something emotional and elegant.

THE VERDICT: An aural and visual delight as fleeting as the time the two spirits get to spend together as one, Entwined devotes itself to its sensations more than its play. The movement of the two control sticks becomes fluid even if it’s a bit weak to be the backbone of the whole experience, but the beauteous abstraction of the two spirits coming together prevents the game from feeling empty. Soaring as the dragon is more devoted to the emotional release than providing strong gameplay, but the brevity and simplicity of its story makes it more of a poem than the deeper love story that would allow the artistic angle to shake off its mechanical reality.

 

And so, I give Entwined for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. It’s easy to get swept up in the building score and the burst of visual splendor when the dragon is formed, but getting there doesn’t have the same emotional weight. The game does test the limits of its control method pretty well, but once you become accustomed enough to the game you don’t need to think much about how they move, you’re not given the the visual and aural snacks needed to tide you over before the explosive unification of the two souls. The tunnels are beautiful for a time and the music can balance relaxation with a constant sense of building energy pretty well, but any performance less than perfect will lead to loops that lose their luster and action that reveals its basic design once its being asked to carry the experience for longer than intended. The dragon soaring segments are perhaps too free form when viewed in combination with that gameplay failing, the game either needing to devote time to more emotion focused play or making the mechanical challenge either more substantial or, oddly enough, more forgiving. If it’s focused on being an evocative experience then you wouldn’t want the player’s failure to limit how they engage with the artistic side of things, but if you want the interactivity to require skill like the later lifetimes and the extra mode imply, then it might need something more than this arcade-like action.

 

Entwined still comes out solid because the dual stick play is decent for what it is and the sensations of the game are strong enough to keep the player’s interest, but it feels like the presentation and the play need to sync their souls together better. It could have been a master stroke for the dragon segment to bring together the action and emotion into beautiful congruity, but instead, Entwined’s gorgeous visuals and occasionally challenging play move at too slow a pace to let you just drink in the experience while limited ambition keeps the game from truly taking off.