Syndrome

Genre: First-Person Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Action Games Bundle, along with Deflector and Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron.)

Syndrome is a First-Person Horror game released on PC in 2017, ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2017, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. In this game, players awaken with amnesia on a derelict spaceship, contacted by the last few survivors of some sort of disaster. They must find a way to survive the horrors that await them on the ship, figure out what’s going on, who to trust, and how to fix this situation.

The presentation here is decent but unspectacular. In its original release, Syndrome looked good but it wasn’t exactly a AAA-level game, and there are some clear cutbacks here – you see pop-in in larger rooms, objects often use simple 3D models, there are some really low-res textures… nothing outright damning, but definitely all signs of a diminished port.

However, one area that definitely hasn’t suffered is the sound design. The ambient sound design in this game is very creepy, building up the game’s level of dread right from the start. This is exactly the sort of atmosphere you want in a Horror game, though I do think the sounds you’re hearing aren’t exactly environment-specific. You just get creepy sounds and ominous music wherever you go, but it’s not like you hear creepy hospital sounds in the medbay, creepy skittering sounds in abandoned areas, and so on.

Having said all of that, I felt like the “creepy/scary” level went down once I actually started getting attacked by enemies. They seemed uninspired to me, and their movements didn’t really come across as scary, just… well, standard creepy videogame enemy, I guess. This is a game where you’re encouraged to sneak around rather than fight, and after downing the first enemy easily with a few thwacks from my melee weapon, I definitely felt like this game doesn’t do the best job setting up those gameplay expectations. Shortly afterward, one of the survivors on the comm shouted at me, panicked, “run!”, to which I responded with the thought, “why? I can take ‘im.”

As it happens, no, I couldn’t. Oops.

This game’s sneaky kinda’ Horror gameplay has been done before, and much better, in games like Alien Isolation, thanks to Syndrome’s often linear level design and lack of variety in ways you can hide and evade enemies. Furthermore, even with the game telling me my next objective, it wasn’t always clear where I needed to go. The labyrinthine nature of the ship’s corridors now that debris is blocking off some areas doesn’t help matters here.

Then there’s the story, which seems somewhat generic. Starting the game with amnesia isn’t an encouraging start, and a ship that started mysteriously going all crazy and violent after picking up a mysterious piece of cargo seems pretty well-trod ground. Oh, and the two voices on the radio with conflicting stories? That sound a lot like what you encounter throughout the game Bioshock. And Q.U.B.E. And a bit like Firewatch. And… you get the point.

Even beyond that, I just didn’t feel any attachment to the characters or story here, and I think a large part of it is the frustrating writing. I cannot stress enough how annoying it is when a character tells you “there’s more going on here… but I’ll tell you later”. You get this treatment multiple times in this game, from multiple characters. No, you jerks, you’re the ones asking me to do things for you, explain what’s going on now. And that’s not even getting into how your character is not only unable to choose which of the two radio voices to believe, but makes some pretty boneheaded decisions over the course of the story.

“Yeah, this ship is clearly suffering from some sort of dangerous, infectious… something… I’ll totally do what you say and set a course for populated space before I fully understand what’s going on!”

I’m reminded of the observation that in the first Alien movie, if everyone did what Ellen Ripley said and quarantined the guy carrying an unknown alien lifeform instead of bringing him onto the ship, everyone else on the ship would have survived. Of course, she was undermined by Ash, who… but I digress. My point is that you see your character making obviously bad choices like these without any justification or ability to choose otherwise, and it’s hard not to lose respect for the whole plot as a result.

In the end, I don’t think that Syndrome is a bad First-Person Horror game, and in fact it has some elements that are genuinely good, like the sound design. However, it’s hard to appreciate this game’s better qualities when it seems derivative of other, far better games. I linked to multiple such games in this review, check those out instead.

tl;dr – Syndrome is a First-Person Horror game where players awaken with amnesia on a spaceship plagued by some sort of disaster. This game has some genuinely good elements, like the sound design, but overall Syndrome is clearly inferior to multiple other games it shares similarities with, most notably Alien: Isolation. Play those games instead.

Grade: C-

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