Last October, Bean’s Quest and Time Surfer developer Kumobius released Duet ($2.99), a twitchy and extremely challenging arcade game. It received critical success far and wide, including our own review, and seemed to do fairly well in the charts too. Nothing earth shattering, but decent. Then in late February through mid-March, Duet saw a huge resurgence, and actually came to hit the top three in the overall paid charts, coinciding with a price drop to 99¢. Duet always felt like it should have done better in the charts than it had, and finally it was getting its due. I actually think it had something to do with the whole Flappy Bird phenomenon and the sudden obsession with super challenging twitch games.
Anyway, that resurgence meant that Kumobius could spend some more time and resources pouring some extra love into Duet. Last month the game received a new Daily Challenge mode, and today Duet has been updated with some new levels and complete voice narration for the tiny bits of text in the game. Voiceover is never something I considered for a game like Duet, but now that it’s here, it makes total sense. The game is incredibly elegant and hypnotic, and the spacey female voice blends in perfectly with the rhythmic beats and trippy electronic soundtrack. Of course, if you’re not into the whole voice thing, you can simply shut it off in the options.
The other big part of this update is a batch of new levels added to the “B-Side" of the game, as well as a slight restructuring of what’s included as part of the main “A-Side" campaign. Here’s how the new/moved levels breakdown, straight from the update description:
– “Revolution", a set of challenges focused on spinning and twisting blocks. You will lose control.
– “Quickening", includes extremely fast but quick challenges.
– “Resilience", is focused on longer challenges that are endurance based. If Quickening is a sprint then Resilience is a marathon.
– “Transcendence", originally part of the A-Side. These stages have been relocated and expanded with an additional challenge.
Finally, the difficulty of some of the Acceptance stages has been modified, and Acceptance IV has been removed altogether and placed in the Resilience area of the B-Side. It’s been replaced with a brand new level, but if you’ve achieved Perfection on Acceptance IV prior to this update, you’ll still retain that even with the level being moved. That about sums up this latest update, and if you haven’t yet experienced the awesomeness of Duet make sure you rectify that with this updated version.
