SYMMETRY

I was expecting something like "This War of Mine", but I wasted 2.5h of my time on repeatable micromanagement and investing in a story that does not mature (IMHO). The game has a potential: animations and sound create a marvellous climate, the curiosity slowly builds through the early game. The idea is great, and this is what lured me into playing this game. Unfortunately, both game mechanics and the story are underwhelming. The mechanics boil down to sending the same people to do the same chores, just managing their work/rest balance. If you forget to catch someone right after they come back from scavenging and send them to rest, they will keep working and freeze to death outside the shelter. That's it. No upgrades (beyond storage capacity), very primitive learning, no new locations, resources, etc... Oh, once upon a while, a piece of equipment will break. You must repair it ASAP, and there is no strategic decision making. To win, you must collect a certain amount of resources as quickly as possible. The breakups just force you to spend some of these resources, without giving any real challenge or advancing the plot. Two leaps forward, one backwards, all hail RNG. After 1h, when I realised that there isn't more to this game than sending people to work and rest, I was just going through to see the plot, these breakups really annoyed me. The plot: it starts great; it looks like a complex story with a lot to discover. However, these teasers at the beginning (flashbacks/hallucinations, dialogues mentioning supernatural events...) remain an unfulfilled promise. There is no moral complexity at all, there are no interactions of crew members, and the grand finale left me with the question: seriously, that's it? I've been playing games for 20 years now, and "Symmetry" was so tedious and unrewarding, that I decided to write my first ever review. If the game were dull and stupid, I wouldn't complain. I'm disappointed because the game has potential and wastes it.

Disclosure: I got this game for free. It's basicallly a mobile game on PC. Challenging at the very beginning before you get a grip on how stuff works and then gets very boring very fast. Has no depth whatsoever, all you'll be doing is repeating the same stuff over and over and over and over. If you got it for free as a git from GOG, like I did, you can kill an hour or two but that's about it. A $10 asking price for this is laughable. It's not even worth $5, unless you feel generous and want to throw some money away.

Space ship crash-landed on unknown planet and it's crew is fighting for survival and if Living stars do grant, ship repair. Setting sounds good. Implementation is... uhoh. This game is micromanagement, distilled. You are giving orders to survivors. That doesn't sound that bad, does it? You. Are. Controlling. Every. Single. Movement. Your crew has no brain. They will go out no matter the conditions, to die bold death by freezing. It takes one replay to get the rhytm and after you fail, one replay to execute flawlessly, if you manage to concentrate for that long. I felt like boiling lunch-sized serving of rice grain by grain. If what you like is micromanagement and repetitiveness, you'll enjoy this game. Otherwise, move along.

The game is all about keeping a station alive thru fuel, tech and food, tech to fix when things break which they do alot. I wouldn't say this game has hours of gameplay, it's pretty much one half hour of gameplay and hours of slogging doing the exact same thing over and over again. Let people reasearch a bit while keeping the station stable early on, then I'd say put them to autopilot except a single trip can take between 60-90% of their health, which means you have to send them to the rest/healing station every. god. damned. time. they approach the base before they might kill themselves in the cold. Some things are automatic and that is definitely a saving blessing, that when they have rested or eaten they return to their previous tasks thank the gods! But I couldn't tell you what the story is, something about a group ending up finding an AI and taking it with them back to earth, because I didn't care to read all the dialogue that felt way too long and contained next to no information, more like someone diary entries. I hate micromanaging so the game has basically no value to me as a player, but someone out there may find some interest in the story if they can take their time with it.

theres nearly no meat in this game, its a 2 ending affair and even the most novice can get it done is a few hours or even less the art is very nice, and the feeling of weirdness of the place is great. However great they are, the game is just too thin on the game side of things if you didnt get it when it was gifted so long ago, and you REALLY want it, wait for a DEEP sale, like 2 euros, 3 at most