User Review : Entwined

Lovers: A Tale of Two…Different Species? Ewww

E3 is quite a strange and unique thing in the games industry. By all intents and purposes, it is just a dressed-up PowerPoint presentation intended to excite fans and journalists covering the event while also geared towards showcasing upcoming titles to these publishers’ investors. And as the result of today’s current gaming climate, it’s often this odd marriage between middle-aged businessmen standing on stage for a few hours hyping up gory shooters or dance games in the background. It’s…rather fascinating the more you think about it. Squished between the cover shooter The Order: 1886 and the inFamous: Second Son DLC announcement in Sony’s E3 2014 conference was a humble little indie game called Entwined. In this day and age, it’s tough to find games that try to present a message solely through game mechanics or simply get release dates the day of their announcement (for PS4 here) on gaming’s most prominent hype platform for stuff often coming a year down the line; yet here's Pixelopus's first effort doing both. When the cross-buy compatible PS3 version came out later and the stars were aligned, I was glad to have my chance in finally testing this one out. And though it lives up to the sound and aesthetic quality of the initial trailer, the rest rings hollow on both a mechanical level and in its artistic intentions.

The quixotic story is about two souls, a fish and a bird, who are in love but aren’t destined to be together.

The initial game-inspired confection I thought about was a mix of the dual-stick gameplay in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons crossed with that of Star Fox 64’s corridor stage before fighting Andross; maybe Dyad would be a more relatable example than Star Fox since that’s on PSN too. In this “single player co-op” game, you take control of an orange fish and a blue bird locked to their corresponding control sticks. In the first stage of each level, these two forlorn lovers are stuck on their half of the corridor. The goal’s in collecting a set amount of energy via grabbing orbs and passing the color-coded gates correctly: fish through orange portion(s), bird through blue portion(s), and both close together for green portion(s). After both energy meters are filled you’re able to enact a process that gets you to the second stage: both come to together to form a green dragon and debouch from the previous tunnel to an open, abstract landscape.

It’s with this kind of idea that I can’t help but venerate what I like about this type of game on a conceptual level. Having two separate characters wanting to be together being forced down some narrow tunnel to then finally become one and soar freely in any which way sounds poetic. Since each of the nine story levels are considered “lifetimes,” and the nine corresponding trophies marry some particular theme with the visuals and music, perhaps it all signifies them finally being together after their respective lives have ended or it could a celebratory account of the struggle itself to be with one another through each specific period—be it trial or otherwise; maybe more towards the latter explanation considering that the dragon’s altered appearance reflects in how you performed during the first stage of each lifetime.

In these regards, the on-paper stuff feels rather exhilarating to even try to expatiate about this simple game concept and its multivalent meanings; unfortunately, it’s hard to feel much else for the game proper. The tricky part is in expounding how the core design butts heads with what it’s trying to accomplish both mechanically and thematically.
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Stage 1:

The incipient stage to each of this pair’s lifetime doesn’t really develop much beyond what someone could glean from seeing a few seconds of footage, which is part of the problem. There’s still a lot of permutations to the proof-of-concept phase here: one-note segments for each creature to pass through their matching color-coded gate eventually grow into multi-layered gates that may expand and contract, carefully spiral from the bottom of each semi-circle hemisphere to the top (or vice versa), slightly rotate as you draw near to them, make inconsistent patterns that may demand one side to perform the exact opposite of the other, and so on. While there’s a gradual uptick in new tricks as the game goes along, there never feels like any sort of evolution to the game’s core conceit. It certainly gets more difficult but it’s still—fundamentally—the same corridor-crawling from beginning to end.

This wouldn’t appear to be such a bad thing if it weren’t for other fundamental issues. Since it’s encouraged to rotate both animals on the outside of their respective half-circles—where control feels more fluid, it’s tough to take in everything since you’re drawn to focus on the center of the screen while the fish and bird remain on the periphery. It feels nigh impossible to actually look at their positioning while also trying to mentally register the complex patterns up ahead. It’s in this uncomfortable sensation of essentially flying blind that a lot of useless frustration will occur. On top of this issue are these out-of-the-blue moments of game freezes. This didn’t happen very often, but this kind of issue has a detrimental effect to the player experience, especially after performing so well in collecting energy to only lose a sizable chunk by messing up at one gate through no fault of your own.

One of the most fascinating methods of transmitting stories and meanings in games for me has recently been the upswing of trying to do it through the controller; your actions in effect communicating everything it may be trying to say. And though I can appreciate Entwined making a valiant attempt at that, it needed to do something more tangible in making it feel like these two had some deep sense of love for one another, striving to continuously go through these lifetimes to be together—through the ups and downs. It does admittedly do that during the transitional phase between stage one and two. The euphonious soundtrack that begins more serene segues into livelier beats when both energy bars are filled and you begin their connection (pressing L1 + R1). The pace of the tempo and tunnel-running quickens while the iconography changes. Each successful gate draws them closer together on the top of the screen, and allowing one to save the other in case a failed gate is triggered, until eventually they become one. In a way, it feels…suggestive. And when considering how often “suggestive” in games usually has the same visual stimuli from that of movies (nothing inherently wrong with that), it’s refreshing to see that sort of reading discovered only through gameplay.

Before even reaching that transient moment of meaningful engagement though, these two are just flying down a tube as two alien entities for the majority of play. Compare that to something like Brothers. Within the beginning coastal village level, you completed puzzles by using both of the brothers’ unique physical capabilities AND personalities in several instances to reinforce how important each one was to the other and develop a sense of companionship along the way. Could that really be felt the same way here? Granted, the visual cue when both meet in the middle and turn green is a nice subtlety, perhaps reflecting on their adoration towards one another to the point that they’re ‘glowing.' But because they’re most often far away from each in completing these gates—which is another problem stemming with both having to stay far apart for optimal controller responsiveness, the majority of play just felt like these two were separate individuals unconcerned for one another.

Even the very failure states set up for the tunnel segments seem contradictory to what a game like this would want to achieve. The method of being “rewarded” here is essentially not losing any of the energy in their respective bars; however, should either the fish or crane miss one color portal the whole gate immediately ends, the controller rumbles for a moment, and that specific character loses meter energy. It’s such a strange contrast to this otherwise genial, zen-like tone Entwined’s trying to make the player feel. This also upsets its core thematic concept about love because love isn’t really some binary emotional response that’s about counting your ‘wins’ and ‘losses.’ For a game that seems to pride itself on the abstract in so many respects, this feels like yet another missed opportunity to explore this theme; instead, it resorts to standard win/loss conditions in a way that feels unnecessarily punitive.

Conversely, there’s also no kind of triggered fail that results in a ‘game over,’ so to speak. Even when that quick fail is triggered, the only consequence is spinning your wheels by collecting pellets and passing gates just to get back to that character's previous energy level. As a hypothetical designer (in this scenario) what would you think about this if it were your game: the one tangible punishment for losing is that the audience has to keep playing your game for a longer amount of time?
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Stage 2:

Although I still admire what the dragon section was going for and the few interpretations it may have, it’s—yet again—a waste of potential from a gameplay perspective. After the culmination of these two souls, one can easily see how that stark contrast with flying a singular creature in a wide-open landscape could be a nice respite. In regards to visuals, these open areas look nice. Varying from mountain ranges to a theme park venue, these colorful locales with an impressionist art style all have a specific tone they excel at showing off. The problem comes in the controls feeling clumsy. Though not feeling poor to the same degree, the first control scheme that came to mind was Lair’s updated gamepad controls. Rather than feeling like I could figuratively spread my wings and soar to my heart’s content, it felt more like pushing the dragon’s directional cone. Like the open area itself, it all felt so confining.

Even within this second stage the implied goal still limits itself to just collecting more colored pellets. Once enough have been collected, you’re able to perform sky-writing (essentially a colorful contrail) that lasts for a few seconds. All of these failed executions in having a needless objective, kinaesthically underwhelming flight controls, and such a small free-roaming environment made my expressive nature feel hardly any less restrictive than during the tunnel sections.
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As mentioned towards the beginning, the visual and audio aspects would be the best features of Entwined. The creature designs that look as though a bunch of quadrilaterals were bent, molded, and glued together along with the vibrant backdrops in each lifetime show aesthetic skill. The visual artists certainly seemed driven to make you say “that’s quite lovely” as much as possible. It could become rather bothersome when the background would feel too disorienting and throw me off when passing through more complex gates, however. The different mixtures in this pop soundtrack are pleasant and compliment the differences between the fish and the crane in rather inventive ways; unfortunately, some of the smaller sound design queues don’t really flow with some of the background music at times. But these quibbles are just minor speed bumps to what's otherwise a delightful experience for the eyes and ears.

Replayability may be another concern for the more consumerist-focused gamer trying to keep a tight budget. The overall run time lasted around the seventy-five minute mark for the campaign when it was all said and done. This may worry some since the retail price is $9.99. While that dollar-per-hour value may be tested there, supplementary challenges are also available. There’s five challenges in total with each one unlocked after reaching at least a certain score from the past challenge. It essentially acts as a survival mode: players get three lives (losing one for each failed portal) and have to last as long as possible, which in turns gives them a higher score.

Though I do my best at trying to be a completionist for my reviews, I could only make it to the third challenge (dubbed “Fire”) before giving up. Even when trying to replay a few lifetimes and roughing it past the tough challenges, I eventually just got sick of it; and that says something for me to not even bother irritating myself to that level of no-stone-left-unturned completion in order to get that cathartic high from success just because the core gameplay started to feel boring.

All in all, Entwined earns some faint adoration by me in striving to spend energy with focusing on using these game mechanics as metaphor. On a surface level, freshmen developer Pixelopus brings some stuff to the table that really is engaging to speculate over: the two souls becoming one, the difference between the first and second stage, and even the very trophies acquired corresponding to that specific lifetime. There’s enough meat on paper here to even make this as part of a long-form essay on PSN art games that try communicating something to the audience, similar to how certain film critics and teachers can dissect films on a scene-by-scene basis. Those artistic intentions are cool to consider; however, all of that wide-eyed enthusiasm I may have for the concepts presented here comes to a screeching halt when a game meant to be about love causes me to elicit emotions diametrically opposite of that while playing it.

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