Daily App: Duet challenges you to stay alive while you dodge walls
Duet from Kumobius takes a simple action of spinning two dots in a circle and turns it into a challenge by adding some upbeat, yet eerie electronic music along with a impending sense of failure that hangs over your every move.
In Duet, you use your thumbs to control two circles that are placed on the opposite sides of a ring. The ring is there for visual purposes and serves only as a reminder of the track that the circles spin on. The circles interact with walls that fall down the screen, and your challenge is to spin the circles to avoid the walls. If you hit a wall, you die and are tossed back to the beginning of the level. The wall that you hit also is stained with the "blood" of your circle and these blood stains increase every time you fail. The game admonishes you to "keep calm and avoid everything," and that is sage advice, even if it is difficult to follow.
It's only through a carefully choreographed series of movements that you will be able to survive a level. With the background music and the graceful back and forth movements of the circles, the game has a dance-like feel -- a dance that you inevitably die in, but a dance nonetheless. Duet provides a curious mix of simplistic gameplay, panic-inducing impending failure, and coordinated controls that when combined is surprisingly pleasing.
Duet is available in the iOS App Store for US$2.99. It is a universal app, compatible with both the iPhone and iPad.
