SYMMETRY

Edited because it seemed harsh hindsight:

Symmetry has potential but right now I do not recommend it even though you would get a decent amount of playtime for your money.

I love difficult games but at the moment this game is not what I would call fun, it's just tedious. The storytelling is not strong enough to be a redeeming quality for the gameplay. It never feels like any progress is being made because of how often the AI breaks modules. The weather patterns increasingly become too dangerous to brave and resources are further and further away as well. It seems as if you make one mistake and lose a crew member then you cannot keep up with the scaling difficulty. There doesn't seem to be any new gameplay as you get further in, just more micromanagement. And the crew members automatically do the same task they were last assigned -- on repeat -- even if they're close to death. This is infuriating on your fifth attempt, let alone twenty. The game is figuratively making sure your babies dont stick forks into power outlets. There's not much else besides minimalistic art that wants to die.

I realize that the devs probably intended to make the game frustratingly difficult. But unlike Dark Souls or other "difficult" games, Symmetry never provided satisfaction. It did provide mind-numbingly high amounts of clicking and scrolling. The interface is clearly designed to make it difficult to watch over all my crew at once but add the incessant need to override previous orders and I found it unfun even with the pause feature.

Symmetry continously moves the goal post to keep you busy and increase difficulty but the minimal amount of information provided to the player makes every decision feel like a gamble. And I could see that being both good and bad. But after 20 days pass in-game, it doesn't seem like your choices even matter because of how much goes wrong all at once and how short your windows of opportunity are for recovery.

The game seems really cool in concept but the execution seems to have unintentionally crossed the line between difficult and unintuitive.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Edited to add further feedback:

One thing that kept killing my immersion. Why would I need a wood stove to heat what seem to be electric coils when I have an electric generator that has the capacity to rapidly charge a backup battery. If they're actually vents and not heaters then my mistake. It seems like the devs put significant effort to bring this realistically harsh environment to life but every time one of those coils broke I could only question the efficiency of heating the base.

One thing that I think that could be done better is the weather station. It only tells me what the immediate weather is, as far as I know. Which the art has already done a great job of doing. Yeah, it's nice to know an exact temperature but shouldn't a weather station help forecast as well? Even if it's just a short while. That would really help make it feel like my choices are meaningful instead of what seemed like pure RNG.

I appreciate the quick response from the devs, thanks again!

This game is about one thing: making sure your characters don't commit suicide by stupidity.

There's an apparent level of complexity at first: you have to train your characters to maximize how many resources they gather, and then subdivide them between different tasks. But most problems this game presents aren't that difficult. You max out characters' skills in whatever task they'll be performing, then never worry about that mechanic again. You set one person to gather lumber a million times in a row, and then never worry unless that counter gets low. You set one person to gather food, but no character gets hungry that often and its never hard to make more food. So the only thing you actually care about is gathering electrowaste, which is the resource you need to accumulate to win.


The grind for electowaste is painfully slow and unsatisfactory, made even worse by the fact that you have to spend it on the constant repairs that get more expensive throughout the game. If you lose a single person, you fall behind, and your entire game can come grinding to a halt as the difficulty curve only rises. So how do you loose someone?

It's always weather exposure. Characters have to walk a long way to reach resources, which gets longer as the game goes on, and that depletes their health, which you need to send them to a healing pod to restore. You have to do it manually, every time, and by about mid game you have to do it every time a character returns to the ship. If you don't, THE CHARACTER WALKS DIRECTLY INTO THEIR DEATH.

This is what makes the game infuriating. If you don't constantly babysit the characters, they will walk out into a snowstorm with a quarter health and kill themselves. The worst part is, even if you just set them to eat food or something instead of healing up, they automatically resume their main tasks, which means you constantly have to check if they are trying to kill themselves again. On top of all of this, the UI, while pretty, is clearly designed to make it even harder to track your characters.

While this game advertises itself as a challenge, it's a challenge a solve with a simple script. If you could program each character to rest up every time they're about to go outside, the player would barely have to pay attention to this game to win every time. Instead, the designers of this game intentionally limited what the player could do in order to create a mind-numbingly frustrating micromanagement experience.

This game has a cool concept and cool art, I just wish it had real gameplay to go along with that.

I get what it's going for: a grounded portrayal of human frailty. But I'm not convinced it makes for a good game. Overall, it feels so determined to be serious that it forgets to be fun...