Symmetry, stylized as SYMMETRY, is kind of like The Sims if you were required to keep a house full of characters alive in an environment where everything was out to kill them. Basically, you order a bunch of people stranded on a hostile planet to rest, make food, chop down trees to keep the base warm, and find “electrowaste” to fix the power generator as it continually breaks down. The challenge here comes from the fact that the three characters you’re given at the start of each new game (and any future ones that show up as you survive) aren’t particularly talented at any of these things and have to learn how to effectively perform these tasks, and even after that they may only barely scrape by. Failure to pay attention to the state of your characters—and how especially cold weather negatively impacts their health—can and most likely will cause them to keel over. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; after all, meat is meat, and hunger is also a constant consideration.

My first attempt didn’t go well

Diving into the game, you’re taught a small handful of things like the fact that there are two different view settings that serve different functions. Zoomed in, you can hover over characters to order them to eat, rest, or perform/study one of a small handful of jobs. Zoomed out, icons show up to indicate any broken components (which is handy since the little popups toward the bottom of the screen can be easy to miss) and allow you to see the current state of each character represented by a smile icon. There’s a big smile, a small smile, a small frown, and a big frown, and this is really just a quick way of determining which characters are hungry/exhausted enough to potentially die. Symmetry doesn’t explicitly tell you how to play it, though, so I didn’t realize the importance of keeping everyone fed. Once a character died from hunger (at which point you can either bury them or use them as food), I decided to hit the skull icon in the character menu to see what it did. As you’d probably expect, it kills off that character. My first attempt thus ended in complete failure.

The second attempt was only slightly better

I started well enough by having everyone doing varied jobs, but ultimately failed to pay enough attention to them. The first guy died from exhaustion when the power generator went out and he couldn’t rest (because resting is a quick electronic refresher in this game rather than sleeping all night), and the other two were subsequently worked to death. Granted, this video is shorter than the first one, but that’s only because I started to become comfortable with the fast-forward speed.

Speaking of which, playing at the faster pace causes a constant ticking sound whenever the game isn’t paused. It’s not quite loud enough to drive you crazy, but it definitely starts to grate on you after an hour or so. This could use a toggle.

Slowly making progress

My third attempt is where I checked the controls and noticed that the space bar is a pause button. That might not seem like much, but hovering over characters while time is ticking causes them to stop moving. Pausing before changing what a character is doing, then, allows you to play in fast-forward mode without leaving characters standing around going hungry while you go through their menus. Now, I have no idea what the actual goal of this game is beyond survival, but it’s around this point that I started to notice that “three key modules need to be repaired” with electrowaste. Sadly, it’s difficult to get your hands on electrowaste while still having enough to fix the power generator if it goes down, and neglect became a problem again because I had yet to become comfortable with how much time you get between a full-blown frowny face and death. Also, you’re having to weigh the health risks of getting firewood and inevitably bringing one character’s health and hunger perilously close to death with not getting firewood and having everyone’s health deteriorate faster than it usually does inside. The whole thing is a balancing act.

Then I finally got on a roll

My first two attempts had everyone surviving a paltry 3 days, while the third attempt bumped that up to 5. In the video above, I kept the group going for 35 days. Talk about an improvement. Really, it was sheer luck—when the person I had been using to make food died and became food, someone else took her place and proved to be several times better at it. I can’t tell if it’s because she studied it or if certain characters have a natural aptitude for certain tasks, but she eventually became a jack-of-all-trades who did a lot to keep the food and electrowaste supplies up. I thought I’d bide my time and slowly ramp up production as more characters showed up (and they keep showing up as you survive), but what I didn’t notice until it was too late was that the wood and electrowaste supplies required a longer walk as the closer sites were used up. Because of that, it took longer than usual when she went to grab some more electrowaste at 1:08:21 in the middle of a snowstorm, causing her to die despite heading out with near-full health and hunger meters. Lesson learned. Naturally, once she was gone is was a slow decline into oblivion for the last surviving member. He simply couldn’t learn to do everything by himself in time.

I’m enjoying the gameplay overall, though one thing I’m noticing is that it’s not always easy to repair things or order characters around. You have to hover over the person or object in question, wait for the menu to come up, then move up to it. It’s surprisingly easy to move slightly to the side, causing it to disappear by the time the mouse pointer gets there, and having two characters close to each other can make it difficult to select the correct one. This isn’t a big deal or anything (because the game is most likely paused anyway), but it can be slightly annoying at times regardless.

The writing is also kind of weird

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the translation is on the rough side. It’s not as apparent here as in other games because you’re so focused on keeping everyone alive that the text boxes almost seem like a distraction, but character dialogue definitely comes across as stilted and unnatural. Characters aren’t clearly defined anyway, so it’s difficult to be invested in their personalities beyond “person who deals with electrowaste/food/wood.” Still, I’ll admit to being interested in what’s happening; various environmental elements glitch in and out (including a body in the food storage after a bit of cannibalism) and there’s a somewhat smug AI nearby.

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