242. Entwined (Pixelopus, Playstation 4, 2014)

Entwined is the first game that I remember being announced simultaneously with its release. While this kind of surprise announcement has become a lot more common in the ensuing years, it felt novel when it was a surprise announcement at Sony's E3 press conference in 2014, but looking at the developer, it shouldn't have been a huge surprise. Pixelopus is an internal Sony development team comprised of former game design students, so it make sense that a surprise game would come from inside Sony from a new low-stakes team. At some point since 2014, Entwined was free, so I grabbed it, and there it sat for a long time, until today, when I gave it a shot.

Entwined is an action game where you control two characters simultaneously using the 2 analog sticks.  The left analog stick controls an orange fish, while the right analog stick controls a blue bird. As you race down a tube, orange colored zones will appear on the left and blue zones appear on the right. The goal is to guide your 2 creatures through the zones without missing. There are also small optional pickups scattered between the zones, and picking these up or successfully navigating though the zones fills a meter that each character has. 

Once both meters are full, you can press L1 + R1 to link the 2 bars, filling them further. The pacing of this portion can be a bit awkward if you are not performing very well. Once the bars meet in the middle of the screen, the 2 creatures fuse into a green dragon, and at that point the gameplay changes into a free-flying mode reminiscent of the wing cap in Super Mario 64 (though not as smooth or fun to control). While there's certainly a decent amount going on in Entwined, none of it feels particularly great, though it's also not offensive enough to complain about. 

The same can be said about the presentation, which looks pretty I guess, but is also abstract to the point of feeling empty. The characters are kind of just glowing blobs, and you're flying though glowing blobs with more glowing blobs in the background. The best part about Entwined is the difficulty of controlling 2 characters at the same time, which is always something I find interesting in video games, even if I've never felt like a game has executed the premise really well. 

3/5, an empty, awkward game where you control 2 characters simultaneously