For all its FX razzle-dazzle, you could argue the $10 PS4 indie puzzler* Entwined* from Pixel Opus is essentially about mastering half-circles. It's like gesturing to describe the shape of a sphere using only your thumbs. In the space of the game's hour or so of content, your thumbs will move along those 180-degree perimeters as if repeatedly tracing a pair of sideways smiles.
But Entwined also is a game about uniting lovers described at the outset as "always together, forever apart." Those half-circles---each occupied by a beautiful, origami-like creature---are more than game mechanics. They're symbolic of the game's romantic dilemma: two halves of an implied whole that signifies infinity, totality, and, most of all, oneness.
Oneness is what you're after as you're pulled through psychedelic tunnels of light and sound, vectoring through colored shapes arranged in puzzling configurations, working through each level (or "lifetime"; the game offers nine) to bring the disjunct lovers together. Passing through an array of shapes with each creature increases a corresponding "togetherness" bar, but you must tag everything in sequence, like completing a lick in Guitar Hero, or the bar decreases.
The shapes eventually appear at shifting angles, requiring dexterous back-and-forth flourishes with your thumbs to touch them all. Because you control each creature independently, the game tries to confuse your brain's hemispheres by asking each thumb to simultaneously perform different patterns. That's where it gets tricky, given that human brains multitask poorly.
Thankfully the design team---all Carnegie Mellon University students---seems to have figured out how much is too much (or how fast is too fast). There's usually enough spacing between each puzzle that, if your brain works like mine, you'll "pre-solve" it mentally, assessing it on sight seconds before your fingers execute the actions. Entwined isn't, strictly speaking, a twitchy game: It's as much about setup as delivery.
When both creatures' togetherness bars fill, you must touch the gamepad triggers, then ace a few more maneuvers at higher speeds to complete the unification. At that point you'll transform into a dragon and emerge, birth-like, from the tunnel into a snow globe-like free area. Here you can absorb power-ups at leisure to fill a "skywriting" meter that lets you leave a trail as you fly, then admire your handiwork before leaving through a portal for the next challenge. When you exit, you're divided into two creatures and asked to do it all over again.
These end-level spaces serve as free-roam rewards as well as metaphors for the emotional phases relationships can go through, shifting, for instance, from abstract carnivalesque backdrops (the "liveliness" level) to volcanic vortex-filled vistas covered in lava (the "anxiety" level) to moonscapes over glacial waters under shimmering auroras (the "enlightenment" level). I'm not sure I understood the point of the skywriting stints, even reaching for it metaphorically, but I'm also not sure I cared, since Entwined works so well for me within the levels themselves, and the end-areas were more chances to catch my breath.
When the finale arrives (don't worry, I won't spoil it), it's almost underplayed, in that what you're asked to do elicits an emotional response without resorting to cut-scenes or narrative spoon-feeding. It *is *somewhat ThatGameCompany-ish (Flower, Journey), but without pretension or artificiality. If anything, there's a sublime restraint and dignity to it.
If I had to complain, I'd fret about the game not shipping with a level-maker that might let you tweak puzzle complexity and variety, or introduce your own visual motifs to the Doctor Who-like tunnels you'll soar through. There's a challenge mode, but it's just a difficulty spike that ratchets up the speed and offers a few extra trophies for achievement-hounds. And the game sometimes hitches when you're shifting in or out of connected mode at the end of a level, though that's probably nitpicking, since the puzzles are spaced out enough that it never threw me off kilter.
As I was playing Entwined, I kept thinking of literary theorist Kenneth Burke's idea of consubstantiality---bear with me, because I'm bringing my own baggage to the game---expressed in his 1950 book A Rhetoric of Motives. Consubstantial is just a highfalutin' way of saying "of the same essence," but for Burke, it was the pivotal question, the one he felt underlay all others: that our attempts to identify with others are at the same time a confrontation of the implications our division from one another. Entwined is metaphorically about squaring Burke's circle. When Burke writes "If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity," swap in "gamer" for "rhetorician" (indeed, what is "play" if not a form of rhetoric?) and you've tied off Entwined with a bow.
