As I combed through my screenshots for representative samples and did all of the other repetitive management things required to prepare a new review, Symmetry received a new update that added an easier “normal” difficulty mode, turning what was previously the default way to play into the “hard” difficulty. The timing of this proved a bit frustrating since the differences were subtle enough to necessitate yet another playthrough; I’ve played through Symmetry quite a bit over the last three days to varying levels of success, and while its steep difficulty curve was initially charming, figuring out how to overcome it on what’s now the hardest difficulty has turned subsequent attempts into a fairly repetitive chore. To put it bluntly, this is a game that completely loses its pull once you figure it out because there’s only one efficient way of succeeding, and while you can technically engage in some of the game’s superfluous, almost decorative mechanics, there’s no real reason to do so.

The story doesn’t capitalize on its potential

Symmetry begins with a brief intro that doesn’t explain much. The short version is that a small, unwilling group is tasked with investigating a distress beacon on a planet supposedly feared by everyone, only to crash land on it. The game begins with three survivors—randomized from a small pool—starting off near their base. The game explains how to order them around and keep them alive, but leaves you to figure out how everything else works for yourself. Having no choice but to piece together Symmetry’s goal and how to accomplish it while keeping at least one crew member alive is something that really complements the atmosphere of post-wreck confusion. Sadly, the dialogue that often pops up is rife with problems, sometimes going so far as to contradict what little the player has been told. For example, one of crew member Kate’s dialogue boxes (because all characters have different dialogue) brings up the fact that no one knows that the planet they landed on exists. That doesn’t really mesh with it being feared by everyone, and while this could be worked around with some elaboration, very little is ever adequately explained.

That leaves the story feeling like a series of pretentious non sequiturs that could have been built into something compelling, but that instead float all kinds of weirdness out there and leave the player to draw their own conclusions about what everything means. The writing quality doesn’t help any, as the phrasing is often stilted enough that it was obviously written by a non-native English speaker. Something else I’ve noticed is that characters occasionally reference the one major event that happens before it does, which had me scratching my head for awhile.

As the walks become longer and the weather becomes colder, the chances of having a character caught in a storm that they can’t move fast enough to escape from go up.

Babysitting suicidal idiots

Symmetry’s gameplay consists mostly of ordering around your group of three crew members (and two more who join back up as you continue to survive) so that they gather supplies. All crew members have health and hunger bars that are replenished by resting and eating, and having these bars fully deplete by overworking or underfeeding characters causes them to die. Once dead, they can be either buried or cannibalized to restore the crew’s food supplies. Character deaths are ubiquitous early on as you figure out the mechanics because crew members have no self-preservation instincts whatsoever; if you tell them to gather wood, they’ll go back and forth gathering it until they drop dead, even going so far as to wander out into especially hazardous -100 degree temperatures. The key to winning (and not going crazy) is to recognize that characters will go back to their jobs after eating or sleeping and using that to get into a rhythm. Basically, one group eats and rests while another group is out scavenging, and then the rested group goes out to scavenge while the now-depleted group eats and sleeps. If you train everyone early on and max out their ability to perform important jobs, winning really is that simple.

Wood is useless

Another tip: don’t gather wood to heat the base. Yes, the game will yell at you over and over again about how cold it is inside, but there are a multitude of reasons not to bother. For one thing, the negative effects of a cold base are virtually nonexistent, especially since most characters will be cycled back outside once their health and hunger bars are refilled. Another reason to avoid gathering wood is that I’ve had multiple characters bug out on their way to get it, causing them to stand outside in the cold until they drop dead. The biggest reason to avoid it, however, is that it’s nowhere near as important as food or (electronic-fixing resource) electrowaste. Things break all the time in Symmetry, and getting into a position where the power goes out and you can’t fix it can be a death sentence. The way to succeed is to train one person to be good at food, with the other two training to gather electrowaste at max efficiency. That way you can obtain a huge pile of it early on, which is important because the difficulty ramps up as time passes. Storms get colder, supply sites are used up and require farther walks, and parts of the base constantly break.

You’re incentivized to ignore gathering wood, not only because its effects are practically invisible, but because failing to do so means that you don’t have to use up valuable electrowaste fixing the heaters when they break. I’m not sure how I feel about this, honestly; on the one hand, it turns the game into a kind of puzzle to be figured out. On the other hand, having one job out of the four available be a red herring designed to waste your time strikes me as antagonistic and counter-intuitive. Even if Symmetry being a puzzle is a good thing, the fact remains that it’s just one puzzle; once you figure it out, there’s nothing left to discover. Every attempt will feel identical because there’s a single best solution, and trying anything else is inefficient.

There’s no purpose to wood. It frequently bugs out and causes people to spin in place until they die from the cold, and the negative effects of not having it are imperceptible.

Playing with saves

One of the things I don’t understand about a lot of games is the way they encrypt their save files to make messing around with values impossible, as though creating your own fun by arbitrarily changing things is a bad thing to be discouraged. It was only when I dived back into Symmetry to try out its easy mode (which causes things to break more slowly and the weather to be less hazardous) that I looked into its save situation and discovered that they aren’t encrypted. Granted, calling them saves is a stretch—your progress is saved each in-game day as a bookmark in case you have to suddenly stop playing, with winning or losing causing it to be wiped—but you can exit out as soon as it saves and start playing with the file regardless. Want it to be day 100? Sure thing. Want to rename a character to something unspeakably profane? The power is in your hands. This should be advertised as a feature.

Atmospheric music and visuals

Graphically, Symmetry lacks variance because the entire game takes place on a small part of a single planet. That doesn’t mean that the visuals aren’t pleasing in their own way, though; there’s a whole lot of white washing things out, especially when it snows, but the pastel pink sky during clear days is a nice contrast. Characters are also distinct enough that you can immediately recognize who’s supposed to be doing which job, and this makes getting into a comfortable rhythm quite a bit easier than it’d be otherwise. I have no idea why everyone’s nose looks like a glued-on prosthetic in their portrait pictures, but it probably has something to do with how difficult it’d be to communicate nose depth given the art style. Then there’s the music, which is laudably atmospheric, but “atmospheric” also means “not musical enough to be remotely memorable.” I understand the value of using music to build up a sense of danger and foreboding, but more often than not this ends up being a double-edged sword; memorable melodies can be used as a hook to keep players dwelling on their experiences with a game, whereas atmospheric tracks go in one ear and out the other, often failing to make an lasting impact.

*A Steam review key for Symmetry was provided for the purpose of this review

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