Never have I played a game that started with so much promise, but ends up devolving into an almost unplayable mess like Syndrome. The game bills itself as a stealth horror game in space (something I can get behind) but in reality, after about an hour of tense gameplay the whole thing simply turns into a walking simulator full of needless backtracking. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
” Just as the story starts developing the unthinkable happens –The game gives you a weapon…”
Syndrome is a game that takes the best elements of horror games that have come before to try and create something unique. I know a lot of people knock games that “borrow” elements, but personally I don’t have a problem with it, as long as they bring something new with it. Syndrome initially does this and sets up quite the promising start. It’s the sort of game you just can’t help rooting for.
The game pickup with you wake up from cryosleep on a broken down spaceship where things have gone terribly wrong. It seems that most of the crew are dead and you’re the last of seven engineers and are tasked with fixing the ship as well as finding out what the hell is going on. From there you explore the ship and come across all sorts of cheap jump scares. It’s all pretty standard, but the game does set a wonderful atmosphere with the help of some nice lighting.
For the first hour of the game you are going to be completely on edge, reacting of every little noise or shadow. It’s a maddening experience and the developers go a good job of keeping the tension high with only spurts of release. Monsters are only seen in shadows with only the briefest glimpse of what they really look like. It’s all quite scary yet exciting at the same time. You are afraid of what’s around every corner, but you can’t help but peak. Well, you’d peak if the game allowed you to lean… Still, It all works just as it does in Alien Isolation (one of the game’s it borrows from), but just as the story starts developing the unthinkable happens –The game gives you a weapon.
Syndrome goes from a stealth game with the tension cranked to eleven and adds combat, killing the entire feeling. This little addition changes the entire game as it forces you to face enemies which ends up making them lose all their impact. Things are scary when they are in the shadows, just out of the corner of your eye, but when you face them down they lose all the mystique and apparent threat. When this happens you also learn that the crew isn’t dead, instead turned in what amounts to the Borg from Star Trek. Syndrome also switches from Alien Isolation and goes into System Shock territory at this point storywise.
The game ultimately fails because it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to do so much stuff that it ends up being a master of none. Syndrome also relies far too heavily on backtracking segments to artificially pad its length. You might be in a room and the game asks you to go to the other side of the map to access something, but when you get there you’ll need to go go back to where you came from to pick up some arbitrary item. This ends up killing the pacing and any tension because you end up bored so much as enemies are pretty sparse. When a drone does attack you as you move about the same area multiple times, you’ll be thankful because you get to interact with something.
Syndrome is simply a poor clone of far better games and at $25 it’s more expensive that any game it borrows from. But the biggest issue I had is that the longer you play the worse the performance gets. It’s not uncommon for the game to drops frames or stutter, even when nothing is around or happening. The real kicker is that the load times are simply atrocious. There were multiple times during our Twitch livestream where loading a floor would take upwards of fifteen minutes. I’m not kidding here as we timed a load at just shy of fifteen. This wasn’t an isolated incident either as it happened multiple times.
But all that loading gave us time to explore the Steam forums and do some digging about issues and lead us to turning up some interesting things. The game has lost of positive reviews which isn’t bad in and of itself, but the forums found that most of them come from key activation’s and not purchases. This led many to think that the developers were giving free keys for positive reviews. I can’t confirm or deny these claims, but the developers are pretty silent on the threads addressing this at the time of this writing.
Syndrome should have been a really solid game, but at the end of the day it simply can’t live up to any of the games it borrows from. It suffers from a crisis of identity, uneven mechanics and basic performance problems. It’s not all bad and tracking down logs is interesting enough, but for the asking price I simply can’t recommend it. If you are interested in the game I’d suggest you wait for a sale and a few patches to see if the developers address any of the issues users are bringing up.
“Syndrome is a walking simulator in the guise of a stealth horror game”
2.5/5
‘Not Great’
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