Still Playing: Duet – a frustrating, joyful, beautifully melodic and starkly clinical contradiction

Publisher/developer: Kumobius Format: iOS Release: Out now

Duet is a game of conflicts and contrasts. It veers between chaos and order, triumph and despair, life and death, never settling on one or the other. You must tackle the game’s endless maze of deadly blocks with calm, surgical precision — anything less brings about a speedy end.

The best puzzle games tend to drop you in a war you cannot win. Tetris pits you against a neverending hail of misshapen blocks that fall faster and faster, demanding that you arrange them into neat rows or face defeat; Bejeweled and its match-three brethren set impossible demands on your ability to match patterns in perpetuity; Drop7 allows you as much time as you need, but punishes mistakes without mercy.

Duet is more poetic than that. In Kumobius’ iOS game, two coloured vessels orbit around each other in an elegant, fragile dance. Touch the left side of the screen and they rotate anti-clockwise, touch the right and they do the opposite. It’s a game of survival, and the end comes in a crash of colour if their tango falls out of step for even the briefest instant, rewinding the action back to the previous checkpoint.

Your missteps stain the very blocks that you stumble upon, forewarning the near-future you to act faster or slower or turn in the other direction to avoid repeating errors. In the standard and daily challenge modes, where you can crash against the same walls ad infinitum in a bid to get a little further, the stained blocks become emblematic of your shame, your only means of saving face to pass them safely.

Red and blue stains on the blocks showcase your prior misdoings. Die and you’ll see your attempt whir by in reverse.

But in the endless mode, where the levels change every run, the stains of previous defeats take on a deeper meaning. They are badges of honour, a tangible sign that you made it that far, daring you to push a little further before the life is snuffed out of your run.

Endless games in Duet grant you three hearts, which are depleted one at a time with each crash and refilled gradually over time after that. Crash and you return not to the very beginning — that would be needlessly cruel — but to the start of that set of blocks. And in the process you get to watch the game rewind your position, tracing back through your actions as if viewed on an old VHS tape.

The one constant, through every high score run and each explosive death is the music. Composer, multi-instrumentalist and Gotye bandmate Tim Shiel provides a mesmerising soundscape that hooks into your play – it’s even integrated to the point where you can gauge distance and timing by listening to the beats. It makes Duet feel at times as much like a rhythm-action game as a puzzler – much as Korobeiniki’s chirpy melody helped set the workmanlike, futile tone of old-school Tetris, Shiel’s compositions add a brilliant electronic ambience to Duet that aids concentration whilst intensifying its atmosphere.

The shapes and patterns in the black background subtly heave under the weight of the music, drawing you deeper into the screen and encouraging precisely the kind of focus that best suits survival. Where the on-screen action seems claustrophobic in its savage, clinical reality, the music is free and eerie and filled with beauty.

“The final rush of snatching victory does much to make up for the futile, paint-spattered rage that preceded it,” we said in our Duet review in October of last year.

Its hypnotic splendour gets you through Duet’s brutal world. The music makes you want to try again, though it’s the very definition of insanity: trying over and over again to do the same thing while expecting different results. Even when blocks turn invisible or hurtle towards you under a deathly torque. Even when your brain flips out and you turn straight into the very object you meant to avoid.

Duet is frustrating in all the right ways. It’s mesmerising, graceful, intoxicating, melancholic. Its simple façade and simpler concept — keep calm and avoid everything — betray its bewildering depth. Duet is joy and frustration as one; infuriatingly good.

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