Duet Review
Price: $2.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0.2
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 5
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Overall Rating:





Boy am I glad that Super Hexagon exists, because the games that have followed in its footsteps have (mostly) been some real winners. Minimalist takes on gameplay and visuals built around tough-but-fair challenge is a winning formula in my book. From Impossible Road to Pivvot and now to Duet from Kumobius.
Part of the learning curve for Duet is pattern recognition: how can the player learn to avoid certain recurring challenges? Sometimes it requires faith in continuous rotation, sometimes it requires quick changes, sometimes it requires rotating in pace with a rotating object so as to not hit - and in any mixture of those skills so as to challenge the player. That the game uses such basic mechanics, it feels challenging, without ever being too frustrating.
The campaign does a great job of getting the player to nail down the basic mechanics. The endless mode unlocks early on, but I recommend going through more of the campaign to learn more. My scores definitely improved the more I played the campaign.
Endless isn't the only replay source: levels in the campaign have an additional challenge for completing them in a minimum number of 'moves', calculated by touches of the screen. Duet cleverly doesn't actually point this out as a feature going through a level for the first time, allowing the light narrative and the satisfaction of progression to shine through. It's a wonderfully balanced approach.
This is all appropriate for a game that's about negotiating two evenly-spaced objects through odd landscapes. Duet's success is much like its very concept: a clever and balanced one. For fans of challenging minimalist survival games, and particularly Pivvot fans who want something more but different (in much the same way that Kumobius delivered their own take on Tiny Wings with Time Surfer), Duet is a must-have.