You know you’re lost in a metahole when you wonder if the game is annoying you because it’s not that great or because there’s supposed to be a message to the annoyance. We quickly found ourselves deep down that hole with Sym, a game that purports to express issues of social anxiety disorder and does so with the kind of puzzle platformer that instantly makes you feel ill at ease with your surroundings. The mechanics are smart and offer pleasing challenges, but it’s a message and experience hampered by its execution.
The biggest issue is a sense of unfairness that comes from platforming where hit boxes don't feel consistent. How far away, exactly, do we need to be from the spinning blade in order to be safe? How much of a tap on the keyboard is required? It's just not quite precise enough as a platformer to allow you to own your errors. Mistakes can be forgiven so long as we know we made them honestly and the game was punishing us for our stupidity.
And Sym is deliberately challenging, largely thanks to the light and dark level views that you can flip between. When you flip to the dark world, everything is upside-down and the controls flip. It's a little disorientating and, in later stages as you try to avoid traps, it's tricky. As a mechanic for expressing the trapped, anxious feelings this game wants to explore, it's perfectly pitched, but it almost demands even more refined control to tie it together.
Artistically, it’s a triumph. While the black and white indie look may be wearing a little thin for some (we’re likely to see some parodies of it soon), the constant motion of the background and creatures in the game, subtly pulsating and bristling, is unnerving. The screen is alive with subtle movement and it makes you wary of every step you take. Again, it pulls you back into that high concept of anxiety rather nicely.
Sym is a valiant if often flawed effort to tie gaming with an important theme and help promote empathy through experience. It’s just that we’ve had the pleasure of seeing things like this attempted before and with far greater success. As a result there are better puzzle platformers, better socially conscious gaming experiences, and in the case of Braid, games that are both. That said, for the money it’s a very interesting take on the genre with a captivating style, so if you’re willing to look past some of the pitfalls, it’s worth your time.
Interesting, but too loose to be fulfilling.