Beautiful yet oppressive
Symmetry has a great aesthetic about it. It doesn’t really do the game justice, actually. The warm pastel hues and hand-drawn art are inviting, when the in-game conditions are anything but. There’s a dire story at the heart of Symmetry, one that the presentation doesn’t prepare you for.
I realized that when I killed and ate one of my fellow scientists.
Maybe the look of it all makes those moments easier to accept, but, yeah, not really. All the comforting tones in the world can’t really offset exactly how dark it is to murder a friend and cannibalize them. In my defense, she was unhappy. Bringing the whole team down, honestly.
In a more perfect world, I wouldn’t have had to resort to this. Symmetry‘s survival story doesn’t need to end up like that. The three scientists who crash-landed on this planet can make the best of their situation to escape. It requires resource management, team management, and understanding the extreme environment. It probably won’t be easy, though. An emoticon over each’s head indicated their mood; everyone was in poor spirits relatively quickly in the demo.
And, even if those three stay content, it’ll likely come at the expense of others. The developers from Sleepless Clinic told me that there are more playable characters who eventually arrive over the course of the four- to six-hour narrative. Depending on their state, it might be best to kill them before they even make it into the makeshift station. Survival of the fittest and all that, I guess.
From the little I saw, it seems like it’ll be incredibly difficult to play Symmetry without something bleak happening. The conditions certainly justify it. Against-all-odds survival tales rarely go smoothly anyway. Just don’t let its unassuming look fool you; Symmetry is anything but lighthearted.
