Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince – Review
Follow Genre: Puzzle game
Developer: Gamera Interactive
Publisher: SOEDESCO Publishing
Platform: PC, Xbox One
Tested on: PC

Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince – Review

Site Score
6.0
Good: Original concept with retro touch
Bad: Gets worse as a puzzler over time, generic production
User Score
7.5
(2 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 7.5/10 (2 votes cast)

For those who still remember old DOS puzzle games such as Sokoban, a game where you had to shove boxes into their place so everything fitted into place, this game will be rather familiar. Fearful Symmetry brings a lot of retro feelings with their modern pixelated style, simple to control puzzles and a tough twist. 

Fearful Symmetry Logo

Story

There is little story in the game, but at the start you see our little adventurer picking up a scroll, calling the ”supposed curse” that’s connected to it a bunch of hooey. At the same time, however, on the right side of the equally divided screen, we see a monk-like figure that’s been cursed and is supposed to try and rectify this injustice. The characters are somehow connected to each other, probably by the curse of the scroll.. And it’s the player’s job to make sure that both characters on the screen survive their environmental hazards by controlling them at the same time.

Fearful Symmetry 1

Graphics

The graphics are rather neat. It’s a modern retro pixel style with sprites that feel classic. There are environmental pieces that cannot be moved such as walls, trees and tombstones, and some moving parts like traps you don’t want to interact with or patrolling and shooting enemies. Other than the animations that are properly done, the levels seem rather generic with a lot of repetitive tiles. In total it looks like a game that would have been best for a tablet/phone compared to the PC and Xbox One.

Sound

The sound isn’t great either. Whenever there is music it sounds like a royalty-free type of background music that’s looping throughout the entire theme (desert, tomb). In the forest levels, there isn’t even any music at all, which makes harder levels more annoying than they should be. This because of the bleep and bloop sounds when you die or when an enemy shoots. Like most tiles, these sounds are generic as well. There are some forest sounds though, but the lack of consistency feels a bit weird. Besides all this there are no other sounds.

Fearful Symmetry 2

Gameplay 

Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince is a puzzle game where, like established, you have to look left and right at your characters to solve the puzzles each level has to offer. Some obstacles that aren’t in your way for your next step on the left side, will be in your way on the right side and vice versa. You move one tile with each step you take, and each step can trigger new things such as a zombie-arm shooting up from the ground, a beartrap that will go off when you pass it or a flower that starts shooting at you. It’s up to you to discover these few different dangers and realize what they can do to make you fail the level. If you fail, you just start at the beginning of the level to try it again. Because of the small levels, this process goes smooth and flawless, so failing doesn’t feel so bad at first.

Fearful Symmetry 3

The moment that it DOES start feeling bad though is once you have to start over and over again because there’s only one right route to take with specific timing every now and then. This is making the game, especially over time, way more about learning patterns and repeating your previous actions than it is about actually solving puzzles. The fact that the gameplay is prolonged by adding two additional characters over time doesn’t make this much more appealing. Especially since you will use those two characters to solve the same levels. Just in different ways. This makes the game actually rather short in gameplay, for experienced puzzlers/pattern recognizers it might feel like an experience that lasts about 2 hours before you ”finished” it, not taking in account the extra runs with the additional characters or the bonus levels.

Fearful Symmetry 4

Conclusion

Original in its concept as Fearful Symmetry might be, the overall gameplay and generic sound and graphics are somewhat of a letdown. Besides, similar experiments have been done in the past with less frustrating results. But that’s what this game feels like, an experiment. Even though with some more work in graphics and sound-design, it might just have been tilted to the next level, but for now, it’s just enough to amuse most players for a little bit of their time.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 7.5/10 (2 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
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Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince - Review, 7.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Icecreamvamp


I'm a game designer, developer, and reviewer. I've been reviewing for 3rd-strike.com since 2017.

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