The more time you put into Dyad, the more difficult it gets to describe. At it’s core, it seems like a racing game, but it’s not as simple as getting to the end of the track with a decent time. On another level, the game is about keeping up a beat based on how well you’re playing, turning it into a strange music game. On yet another level, it’s about trying to keep your brain from shutting down as you move down a tunnel at absurd speeds, letting your hands react before your mind can process what’s going on. It’s an experience like few others in gaming history.
From looking at the screenshots, it’s something like Geometry Wars getting flushed down a toilet, but its style makes everything simple to understand at high speeds. Rather than have complex sprite designs, the game has gone with strong colors and simple shapes. With that decision in the art design, you can easily tell one object from another based on color and shape. When you’re flying down these tunnels at hundreds of miles an hour and have less than a second to react, you need something your brain can recognize fast enough to signal your hands to push the buttons.
That doesn’t seem all that important when you start out, since the game really takes it easy on you for the first block of stages. They’re the introductory stages, so that’s kind of expected – they’re all about teaching you how to play the game. The funny thing is that the game is always, always throwing new concepts at you. Each level is designed differently than the others, introducing new obstacles and ways to play. At first, you’re expected to just string together hits on blocks that are the same color, but then you’ll find that you can charge a temporary boost by flying close to the blocks you just hit. Then you find out that boost can be lengthened by crashing into enemies, and then made even longer by looking for certain types of ground. It was adding on stuff like this all the way up until the end of the game, introducing invincibility symbols during a handful of the last few levels.
These things make the game play differently every time they’re introduced. For starters, it’s giving you a lot of things to look for on each screen. In any one level, you could be looking for colored blocks, the boost path of anything you hit, triad enemies that can create faster boost paths, enemies that block your route, invincibility tokens that can last longer if boosted through, and creatures that can speed you up even more if you can dodge a homing attack that’s activated when you shoot them. That sentence was about as exhausting as this game is on your mind when you play, but you’ll surprise yourself by just how much you can keep track of every time you’re tasked with shooting down one of these tunnels.
Again, that’s why the developers kept the visuals simple. Simplicity allows your brain to tell the varying symbols apart as you’re flying down the tunnels at full speed. Many of the symbols are colored orange or blue, two colors that provide a natural contrast that is easy for your eyes to pick up. On top of that, they have most of the symbols appear a good distance away, well beyond where I thought I’d be able to hit them with my beams or line myself up to touch them. With the symbols lit up in bright colors and visible from huge distances, it gave the developers license to go for broke with the game’s speed, though. They’ve done all that they can to help the player out, but at the same time, they’ve used it as an excuse to push players to their limits.
Each additional thing you can do in this game draws you in that much deeper, forcing you to concentrate that much harder. You won’t want to (or in some cases even be able to) take your eyes off the screen, or you’ll screw up in some way that will cost you some of your momentum or progress. That will start to feel like the worst thing that can happen to you, since this game turns speed into an addiction. Keeping yourself moving at a breakneck pace just feels very natural, but is something that has to be earned with well-played, careful movements. After a while, you’ll learn the subtle touch necessary to keep the game moving at the pace it was created for, but it’s something that always teeters on the edge of ruin. One screw up is all it takes to return you to a crawl, so the game always feels intense and engrossing.
If speed isn’t your thing, the tempo of the music will probably keep you going. The game’s music is directly tied to your speed and how well you’re playing, which makes the game that much more engrossing. There’s something about the whole experience slowing to a crawl that is almost jarring to your body. Tying the music and speed together just creates this weird experience, one that feels like it’s linked up with into your pulse. Similar principles are usually tied to cardio workouts, where specific music is used to boost your heart rate along with the exercise. It gives the whole game this bizarre feeling of affecting the player in reality.
You really, really want to go faster in the game while being afraid of being forced to slow down. It’s a subtle sensation, one that crept up on me the whole time I was playing. I didn’t notice it much at first, but the game instills this need in you that borderlines on being genuinely addictive. Your body craves that input of speed and music, wanting to keep your heart rate up along with the game while not wanting the jarring halt of slamming into something. It really is a bizarre experience, one I didn’t think any amount of careful gameplay planning would have ever accomplished. Just the same, the mixture of sound and gameplay in perfect harmony gives this game the ability to really sink its claws into you.
It all has to end at some point, doesn’t it? Well, the game has several different ways of keeping you in play. For starters, you can easily pass many of the levels up to a three star level, which unlocks all of the game’s little challenges. Each level has a remix mode that tasks you with doing something a lot more difficult than what you had to do before. If that doesn’t feel challenging enough, you can also try out the additional challenge that unlocks at three stars, one that typically gives you an even harder challenge or handicap. In one of the early levels, I had to hit a high number of colored pairs, but I could only shoot a few times during the level. It meant every shot had to be perfect, something that turned the whole game on its head all over again.
If those somehow manage to bore you, there’s always the online leaderboards. Competing against people from all around the world for the best times will require a level of perfection that I wouldn’t even dream of. Just watching videos of the developers playing the levels at the speeds necessary to win could give the steadiest person motion sickness. If you want more from Dyad, it will always have some more to give you.
The game’s ability to infect you with a need to go faster seems a little bit far-fetched, and I’d understand being sceptical. It’s really something that you need to try for yourself to see just how a game can reach out and affect your body in reality. I’ve never felt so utterly possessed by a racing-style game in my life before this one, or so captivated by something so simple, yet complicated. It will get your mind working at a purely reactionary level, leaving you physically and mentally exhausted at the end of every level.
If you really need more proof, I’ll end with a story. After playing for what I only felt were a few minutes, I started to pick up on the fact that my eyes hurt. I had to shut them for a few minutes when I noticed how bad they were burning. I thought it was something caused by all of the bold colors on the screen, and was reminded of my horrible times with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the N64. After playing it on a few more occasions, I found out that it was because I wasn’t blinking. I was so drawn into the visually stunning and blazing fast gameplay that my body had somehow forgotten to blink.
If you’re a fan of music or speed, it’s a must have.
