Friday, 24 May 2019

Fearful Symmetry and the Cursed Prince


This is one of my newer purchases of the year as it came up in a sale and I was clearing down my wish list so what better way to cross a game off? The sale price was ludicrously low so I took full advantage and was pleasantly surprise by the game for the most part.

Fearful Symmetry is a puzzle game. You control two characters at the same time and they effectively mirror each other’s movements. At first, this is quite easy to get to grips with but as the levels become more complicated, it becomes rather taxing and for someone like me who isn’t superiorly clever, most levels resorted to trial and error. And then guides.

Obviously the big challenge with these is that you need to watch two screens at once for danger and sometimes this becomes incredibly hard to do. At this point, I don’t see how the puzzles can be solved without trial and error.

There is a story to it too. There are these things called Symmetry Scrolls which your hero is tasked to retrieve. The whole thing becomes a circular journey where you recover the scrolls to save your soul (or something) but in turn, end up cursing someone else. You can play through the story up to three times as three different characters but the second and third characters have special abilities that make the playthroughs different.

In terms of graphics and music, it’s got a classic design using a top-down format so there’s little room for graphical glitches or errors. Musically it paints a great picture of the game world and doesn’t interfere with the gameplay.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements

Achievements wise, there are 25 given out just by playing through the story. In some of the levels there are relics which need to be collected for another set of achievements. Most of these are in plain sight but some are hidden by objects that need to be destroyed. This was very rare though.

As you play through the game, you unlock two additional characters who need to play through the same levels except they have special abilities to help navigate the levels. One of these characters burns things with a fire power and this is where the biggest pain in the ass part of the game comes into play. In one level you have to burn something while standing on a square that kills you if you stay on it for too long. The fire power performs itself so slowly that you have to time this to perfection in order to complete the level. It feels a lot like trial and error as to whether the game lets you do it too.

Once you’ve completed all the normal levels, bonus levels and collected all the relics, you are done. As mentioned above though, some of the latter levels are so tricky that without a walkthrough, would take a regular person a very long time to get right.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fearful Symmetry was a fun game up until the levels became stupidly complex. It’s still an easy completion though and is fairly cheap at £8.39.

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