Entwined is a game that claims to have artistic ambitions, but it fails to deliver on anything past the elevator pitch. The story of the game has to be explained to you and is far less as deep as it sounds. During its 90 minute runtime, it does not evolve or go anywhere, and it overall fails to deliver any emotion to the player. I think the template for this kind of game is pretty simple, even though there aren't real "characters" you could use the gameplay to demonstrate the characters becoming in sync for the first time, have them drift apart, and then reconnect at the end… but instead every one of the nine lives that these characters has is exactly the same and does not attempt to tell the story mechanically.

I feel bad coming down too hard on the gameplay, because there is a warning before starting it that the PS5 version is not optimized, and it’s best played on PS4. But it is imprecise and frustrating when you miss inputs. The game is a bit too long for one sitting to demand that the player constantly moves the sticks exactly, and in the later stages I started losing because my fingers were getting tired, rather than any sort of mechanical challenge. The challenges they do add feel bad, for example in life 8 you can’t forsee that it converges at green in advance because the orange and blue inputs are much bigger. The gameplay is repetitive and it’s not the type of game that you can improve upon. It ultimately feels like a less complex guitar hero or rhythm game but without music cues. The presentation still holds up 10 years later, but the game doesn’t have a compelling reason to stick with it.