Entwined is a tough game to describe and categorize. Entwined continues with the minimalist feel of smaller titles that tries to evoke emotions from the player and tell a story without much narrative. The story is described as two souls, a bird and a fish, that are in love but cannot be together. They journey through various lifetimes and once united, their souls transform into a soaring dragon. The story mode is comprised of nine lifetimes (i.e. levels) but there is not really much of the story to go on with. It doesn't set up anything since you're basically thrown into the first level without any explanations and you're expected to gauge what's being told while you're playing the game.
The plot summary is only revealed during the promotion of the game, it doesn't mention anything about it in the game. The control scheme is the other unique aspect of the game. You control both the bird and fish at the same time. The left analogue stick controls the fish and the right stick controls the bird. Each one can move in their half of the screen and you go through a type of obstacle course. Memories appear as glowing orbs and you have to collect these. After collecting enough of the memories to initiate the next stage of the level, the bird and fish unite into a dragon during which you can soar through the area collecting more glowing orbs to end the level and advance to the next one.
The control scheme doesn't work as well as you'd expect using the Vita's analogue sticks so you may have to adjust the sensitivity a bit. Furthermore, when you're a dragon, it is hard to control the flight since you have to point both analogue sticks to the direction you want to go in but it doesn't feel that refined. Throughout the obstacle course, there are colored panels that you must go through: orange for the fish and blue for the bird. Naturally, these become harder as the speed increases and more complex patterns appear. The biggest disadvantage of Entwined is the short length. You can finish the story in 1.5 hours easily with time to spare.
Entwined does come with a challenge mode which has five more never-ending levels and the aim is to get a high score through surviving as long as possible. You can only make three mistakes during the obstacle course and it is extremely difficult since patterns become more complex and the speed increases the further you go along. This challenge mode can easily add hours to your game time if you want to persist and unlock everything. Overall, Entwined is a relaxing game with beautiful simple visuals and a surreal soundtrack. You might want to wait until a sale though since it doesn't have much content, and as the game is cross-buy, meaning you get the Vita, PS3 and PS4 versions at the same time, potentially play it on the big screen with a more comfortable controller to avoid hand cramps.
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