On the Vita, although I also downloaded it to my PS4 because it looked far better, is Entwined. The basic story seems to be that a fish and bird are in love across multiple reincarnations but struggle to ever truly be together. Then as they move forward together they somehow merge and digi-volve into a dragon or even a super dragon. Confused? Well it doesn’t matter; the story makes up about 5 seconds of the actual game and is never mentioned again. That doesn’t make this game bad though because what story there is is only there for setup. This is an art game, an indie game designed to be as artistic as it is functional; a growing trend that has actually produced some interesting games.
The basic idea is simple; you control the fish with the left analog and the bird with the right. Then you lead them through an ever growing complicated series of hoops and make sure they go through their respective color. While it is a simple concept that only uses 2 parts of the controller it is still fairly fun and difficult to play. If I may flaunt my advanced education, it goes back to that idea of trying to do two opposite things at the same time, like rubbing your head and stomach in opposite directions while on one foot. The brain has trouble trying to keep the two separate because it can’t think in two different apposing ways like that… or something I’m not a damn brain surgeon. Point being there is some level of science to it… or the developers thought it looked cool whatever. The challenged mode is damn hard though since you only get so many lives and becomes rather frustrating quickly.
The mix of bright ever changing colors, scenery and music brings the life to this game. Most of it is fairly abstract but the clever combinations improve off of each other. Kind of like watching the screensaver on the windows player while listening to a variety of jazz. I did run into the occasional problem where colors started to blur into themselves and the background and become difficult to distinguish from each other. If it wasn’t for the rather anti-climactic or non-existent ending I would probably find this game more interesting. It is also extremely short, the game only took me about an hour to burn through and that was while I was watching movies online.
