If there’s one thing that really stood out at PAX East this year it would be the titles on display from the independent developers. While well-known companies such as Ubisoft and Microsoft had a major presence on the exhibition hall floor, several games from various indie dev teams were playable for convention goers. In particular, PAX attendees were lucky to play the rather creative and interesting titles being presented by Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Labs. Although Gambit had over half a dozen excellent games playable on the floor, it was the point-and-click adventure Symon that really stood out.
Winner of the 2011 Indie Games Challenge, Symon puts players in control of a man who lays paralyzed in his hospital bed. By holding down the mouse button, the player delves into the dreams of the unnamed man and must solve a number of cryptic puzzles in order to satisfy the needs of the dream and progress the game. Each dream focuses on a particular memory of the patient and usually involves correcting some past mistake. In some cases, the player is required to collect pieces of the childhood home he abandoned or build a locket to apologize for wronging his wife. Each time the game is played, the puzzles are procedurally generated to create an entirely different experience from before.
The big draw of Symon is really the focus of the dreams themselves. While adventure games are often known for setting obtuse challenges for the player to overcome, the often vague nature of dreams really plays into the puzzles themselves. For example, combining sweet chocolates with a depressed stuffed bunny rabbit creates a happy stuffed toy, while using a worn down music box on a bowl of spicy soup creates a lively music box. Symon is very much a game steeped in this sort of bizarre logic and players will only find solutions by adhering to this odd variety of problem solving.
Although Symon revels in the strangeness of its dream states, the game is also quite emotional as well. The central theme of regrets and missed opportunities is a rather sentimental one and the music that accompanies each puzzle is often soothing yet melancholic. The cast of characters are also thematically relevant to regret as the patient has to satisfy the needs of the children he never had or mend the broken bones of the frog he hurt as a child. While there is not really a full narrative in the game, Symon gives the player pieces of the unnamed man’s life that really go a long way towards making him someone relatable and whole.
While it was playable on the PAX floor, the title itself is also available to be played in its entirety online as well. For those of you who were unable to attend the convention this year, the game can be found here.
