The Basic Things to Know

Extremely Difficult to control the dragon

Gorgeous look and feel

Simple gameplay

Serene Game

Difficult challenge mode

The story is about a bird and fish reliving the same events just slightly diffently every time. I think…

In story mode you can miss as much of anything as you want and you’ll never lose but you’ll also never finish

In challenge mode once you miss enough you lose and have to start over.

Left stick controls the fish and the right stick controls the bird. Pretty simple.

The Game

Never before have I seen such a beautifully gorgeous mixture of blue and orange.

Entwined is a sort of musical experience you go through. Nine times in all. The game has you rotate the left stick in order to control the orange fish,

and the right to control the blue bird.

Each can only move across a 180 degree section. There are two objectives, more or less the same. The first, is to grab floating orbs of light, orange for the fish and blue for the bird.

These will increase the respective side’s bar. A bar which represents… life energy?

I don’t really get what it’s meant to be. The second goal, is to swim or fly through incoming barriers of respective color. By going through these barriers you protect the orbs you’ve collected, but miss any and you’ll risk losing some of those orbs.

This brings up an interesting game mechanic which leads to seemingly infinite gameplay on Story Mode. Even if the bar is completely empty on either side, you can always regain the lost orbs through more gameplay on the same lifetime. You never see a Game Over screen come into play. Once you’ve filled out both bars you are given a prompt to hold down L1 and R1 to commence a merge or fusion between the fish and the bird. Now, I don’t exactly know how or why, but the merge results in a dragon. I try not to ask too many questions, so I simply accept it as it comes. Fish + Bird = Dragon. Makes perfect sense.

Once the fusion is complete you appear in a three dimensional space capable of being freely roamed. The space isn’t too large, but it comes with a purpose. For the second time you are to hunting down the colors orbs,

but this time, as the dragon, you can gather of either color. In fact, they show up together.

You collect more… orb magic? To fill a bar at the top of the screen like that of the bird and fish.

Once you do, though, you waste it making pretty little streaks of energy. A portal shows up, you go through it, break out of the dragon and become the fish and bird again, and move on to the next lifetime.

Before I go on, let me tell you how dark I think this game might actually be. Two lovers cannot be together, they are trapped away from each other. They struggle and strive to be together, when they finally accomplish it they decide to die together. A beautiful game about suicide and reincarnation perhaps?

The controls are extremely smooth. Rolling the joystick along its far edges makes it easier to control the bird and fish, although the dragon is impossibly difficult to control. The inability to change the flight controls to invert the Y axis makes for awkward moments in the three dimensional spaces.

The game starts you off on nine story levels named Lifetimes. You start on the first life and unlock the second, upon its completion. After the nine lives are done you've finished the game and should play the challenge mode for some difficulty. That's the sum of it. It's an easy going, pleasant and beautiful experience. Extremely short in the story, but that is part of its charm.

Check out some other reviews, watch the trailer and make a choice as to whether or not you think it's worth it. If you like peaceful gaming, this is for you. I'll leave you with my gameplay for the first challenge level.