[Click here to start from the first progress log]

The good news is that I beat the game. The bad news is that successfully doing so requires a hefty dose of good RNG on top of babysitting your idiot characters who have a penchant for wandering out into -100 degree weather to die because you failed to explicitly tell them not to. Besides which, the steep difficulty seems designed to hide the fact that there’s not a whole lot of content here; once you’ve beaten the game by repairing three modules, everyone takes off and that’s the game. You can play it again, but you’ll be doing the same basic things each time, and even that’s not enough to guarantee a victory if the random elements decide to screw you over.

Some things I don’t like

If the power goes out when you need to go collect some Electrowaste (and you will need to—everything constantly breaks and needs to be fixed with it, necessitating going out to scavenge more whenever possible), you won’t be able to see the upcoming weather patterns. Not that knowing what’s coming helps all that much, but being left totally in the dark makes it possible for a storm to hit when a character is picking up electrowaste on the far right of the map, freezing them to death before they can get back inside. Being unable to avoid losing important characters out of nowhere feels incredibly unfair and can often make the game unwinnable.

Finding yourself in an unwinnable situation is frustrating because the only options left are to either try to scrape by with the other characters (which is unsustainable; the storms ramp up the longer you survive, and supplies require increasingly longer and more dangerous walks) or manually kill them off and try again from the beginning. In the video above, I decided to let my last survivor freeze to death by pointing at them while the game was unpaused to illustrate how it stops them in their tracks. This is why it’s almost always best to pause before issuing orders.

The reason the guy in the last video had no option but to die was because of this guy. Basically, I had one person gathering electrowaste, one person preparing food, and one person obtaining wood to heat the base. A lot of characters in previous attempts had died while getting wood, and it wasn’t until I noticed his pathfinding bugging out that I realized what was happening. Sometimes characters would go out to grab wood, only to get stuck in a constant loop before they got there. Since they refused to come back until they obtained the wood, my assumption that it wasn’t that long of a walk had proven fatal to many of them. Including this guy, eventually. Babysitting characters so that they don’t wander out to their death is one thing because their tendency to continue doing their job can be leveraged, but having to keep an eye on everyone in case they glitch to death outside is game-breaking.

How to beat Symmetry

Nothing tells you that the goal of Symmetry is to repair the three ship components, but it’s a natural enough assumption that I’m not going to hold it against the game. Still, I used Cheat Engine to jack up my electrowaste and repair them to make absolutely sure that this was really the goal (hence survival mode being unlocked on the main menu already). Then I was determined to beat the game for real.

Gathering wood is a deathtrap, and it being dangerously cold in the base doesn’t affect anyone negatively enough to justify wasting much time with it. Remember, the storms get worse and the walks get longer as you go, so it’s a race against time more than anything. With that in mind, I focused on teaching two characters to efficiently gather electrowaste early, with the third learning to cook. When the weather would become bad (especially at night), though, they’d stay in and either eat/make food or learn a more diverse set of jobs. Making food and gathering electrowaste are the only jobs that really matter, though, and the early goal is to keep surviving and gathering electrowaste so that you can upgrade its storage container to hold 100 pieces. It’s also important to keep enough around in case the power generator, food machine/storage, or restorative pods go down. Once more characters show up, they also learn to gather electrowaste efficiently and are then cycled in and out of the pods between trips, either eating right before or right after. The walks at this point are long enough that characters can become restored (or mostly restored) by the time the next group needs the pods, but toward the end there are a few times where half-healed characters have to exit to make room for someone on the brink of death. More than anything, though, I won because of luck. I won because the RNG didn’t break anything when I wasn’t in a position to fix it.

Survival mode is kind of unfair

Anyway, survival mode is unlocked once you beat the game. There are no ship components to fix here, but the game also starts off with a much harsher climate. Not just that, either—where the base game gives you 8 electrowaste to fix the fridge (which, left unfixed, causes your food supply to rapidly dwindle), survival mode tasks you with repairing it yourself. The walks are long, the weather is lethal right off the bat, and I never got into a good rhythm after two of my characters died early. Eventually the power generator broke and I had no electrowaste to fix it, and my last remaining character’s health was halfway empty. She couldn’t use the pods to restore it because the power was out, so she was destined to die either way.

Personally, I don’t like stacking the odds against the player right off the bat like this because it further emphasizes the RNG element while downplaying player decisions.

[Click here to go to Symmetry log #1]

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