Reviewed on: PC

A spaceship crashes on an unknown planet, and its crew has to fight the forces of nature and strange events to manage to escape this hostile environment. Sounds like a movie script, doesn’t it? But that is the story of SYMMETRY, a space survival game created by Sleepless Clinic, which makes the player devise strategies to overcome challenges and unravel the secrets of the unknown.

Survival

Your mission is to repair the equipment needed to escape this planet and, meanwhile, gather information for research about this place and collect the different resources available.

Basically, SYMMETRY boils down to that: surviving. The game starts with three survivors of the spaceship crash, each with certain abilities that will help you beat the terrain’s challenges, such as extreme temperature, strong winds, lack of food and, besides that, dealing with the space station’s equipment constantly breaking down, and strange hallucinations that occur during the game.

Each survivor has their own stats, which are tiredness, hunger and skills, and can also learn new skills or improve the ones they already have. At the start, the player needs to manage the basic skills of gathering wood for the heater, making food to satisfy hunger, or collecting pieces of debris to fix damaged objects or improve the capacity of the facility’s machines.

Besides the basic survival elements, the game also has a timer, which ticks as you try to survive, indicating how many days you have been stuck on this strange planet, and also the temperature of the day you are playing. To cut the wait in some moments when you need to wait to rest or eat, we also have two additional buttons, one for Fast Forward and one for Pause. It is worth noting that when you press the pause button, time stops completely, and gives you as much time as you need to put together a new strategy.

For an even more real survival tone, you can notice that over time, extracting some resources from the planet becomes harder, because the pieces of wreckage for upgrades and repairs, and the wood to serve as fuel to generate heat, start to get farther from the base, so it takes longer to reach the extraction site and, consequently, demands more energy from the survivors, who will increasingly need to be rested and fed to be able to obtain resources.

During gameplay, new survivors can appear to help you in your mission, each also with their own abilities, and some, depending on the point you’re at in the story, can bring new abilities that can help you survive even more, and from then on, those abilities become available to the older characters too.

… Horror?

Isn’t the problem of surviving with limited resources enough? Fine, SYMMETRY brings even more challenges. Players can observe various signs during the game, representing the hallucinations the survivors have as the days pass.

Some are even disturbing, like [SPOILER] the sight of one of the survivors impaled on the communication tower. The strange hallucinations sometimes even suggest a relationship with the station’s equipment failures, like flashes over the heating device, blood on the wall and then the equipment loses its functions.

Since the game is based on survival and some suspense, how to make it even worse? Easy, the station’s survivors can die, that’s right, if one gets too tired or goes too long without eating, any of them can die. The most bizarre fact about this is that when someone dies, the game gives you two options: bury them or use them as food (!!!).

So, would your conscience let you use one of the characters as food? If you think not, I advise you to play the game, try to survive 30 days and see your food running out, and then ~~unfortunately~~ a member of your crew dies, well.. So.

Minimalist and very beautiful

SYMMETRY’s visual choice is quite interesting. The game features minimalist art, and few striking colors, such as white, gray and black, mostly pastel tones, actually. The shapes of the settings also adhere to the game’s visual choice, with geometric shapes that are mostly straight and modern.

The game’s sounds are also well crafted, delivering ambient sounds, sounds of interactions with the scenery, and signals of what is happening with the ship. Unfortunately, the dialogue in the game is not voiced, except for the game’s animated scenes, but it doesn’t affect the experience with SYMMETRY at all.

Verdict

Although SYMMETRY’s technical and weather problems are random, sometimes in its randomness the game makes the survival of one or sometimes all of the characters impossible. In our playthrough, we witnessed the failure of ALL the game’s equipment simultaneously, making it unplayable even with resources up to date.

With a quick internet search, we found that this happened to other players, and it is not a bug or a deliberate challenge, but a mere misfortune in the game’s algorithm. Due to its slightly high difficulty, the developer recently released a difficulty mode selection for the game, which promises to make the situations the game makes us face less severe.

The story, although very interesting, ends up being forgotten amid the dynamism the game’s mechanics demand, making the player pay no attention to the many dialogues that appear on screen, even with the pause option, since we are always worried about keeping our characters alive and resources up to date.

SYMMETRY is a curious, difficult but extremely well-crafted game that may please players who want a distinctive challenge in survival games. The game has its problems, but is far from bad.