REVIEW : Palindrome Syndrome: Escape Room (PC)
Palindrome Syndrome is not the first videogame starring an amnesiac hero waking up solo aboard some sort of spaceship. However, instead of the typical malevolent artificial intelligence or mutated team members, this time you are met with calm. It is clear that something went very wrong somewhere, but for once, the fate of the universe doesn’t seem to be swinging in the balance.
What Palindrome Syndrome lacks in freaks and jump scares it more than makes up for in problems. From the time your character rises in the cryogenic room, they are confronted by a set of puzzles that require to be solved. As is made very obvious by the title of the game, it brings a lot of influence from break rooms. Instead of anything mysterious or complex the puzzles in PS ER are all based on logic but that doesn’t indicate that they are easy. There were a few times that we were stumped by a puzzle only to discover that we’ve been overthinking the explication but for the most part, they are very satisfying to solve.
Palindrome Syndrome is viewed in the first person and everything you require is usually located in your immediate surroundings, so there is nevermore any need for backtracking. Some of the problems are linked, so you will only be able to solve particular puzzles after completing others. The play does indicate when you are lacking something to solve a puzzle, which implies you won’t lose time trying to figure it out. This is quite helpful as unlike other games you won’t find a lot of ideas in PS ER. Sometimes puzzles can seem more difficult or daunting than what they are, but typically it didn’t take us too long to figure out what is expected from us.
Visually PS: ER is a decent looking play although it is a little light on visual options. Players can only pick from four distinct visual settings, Low, Medium, High, and Ultra with the only different option being the resolution. It’s not a very long-drawn game either as the scenes only consist of the aforementioned cryogenic room, a laboratory, break room, office, tech lab, and sickroom. All of the scenes have a very clean, sterile look to them, which fits in with the art fiction theme. The lack of visible clutter also makes it easier to focus on solving the problems.
The game features a couple of atmospheric tracks, but how these cut off abruptly when moving between rooms sounds a little odd. The sound effects are clean, but the voice performance sounds a little stiff. However, since this is a play created by a small indie studio, we weren’t exactly demanding Hollywood calibre voice acting. The game does allow players to modify the volume separately for the music, ambience, sound effects, and voices or simply change the administrator level. The controls are standard first-person fare, but the game can be played with both a keyboard and mouse or a controller. It’s also gratifying to see that players can rebind all the keys and that the option to invert the “Look” axis is included as this is something that is often ignored. Apart from walking around and looking at things players can open their inventory and diary or click on the marked interactive spots to work on the puzzles.
