Syndrome is a horror game set in space. You are stuck on a spaceship and being chased by terrifying enemies from which you have no chance to escape. You have some fairly easy goals to achieve, such as: Be it gaining access to new areas of the ship or acquiring a new tool that lets you explore unreachable areas, while at the same time there could be a threat lurking around every corner.
Who are you in Syndrome?
Syndrome could have rivaled other great space horror games, but some boring game designs, clunky controls, groundbreaking graphics, and progression errors prevent it from reaching the heights it could have. Like most horror games, Syndrome begins with just enough information to understand where and who you are, with a general sense that something is wrong. The game explains your situation through radio contact with your character's superior, who gives you quite a bit of detail to get you excited about the plot, but not enough to fully understand what happened. After that, you have very little contact with others for an extended period of time, creating a strong sense of isolation on the ship.
The ship design
The ship is the standout part of Syndrome with its design. While the design isn't groundbreaking, the ship captures the vibe and design you would expect from a massive space station. Long, claustrophobic corridors with fume hoods and cables exude a nice industrial vibe while still making you feel at home in space. The technology used onboard the ship also strikes a nice balance between far-future sci-fi and down-to-earth realism to make the space feel believable.
problems with syndromes
Syndrome is immature and flawed. The game is full of missing and inferior textures, some of which are so low that you cannot read important information in the game. In addition, there are frequent frame dips that do not prevent you from playing, but do not make gaming pleasant. After acquiring the second tool in the game, a hacking device needed to progress the story, you will not be able to get it working after completing the tutorial. Even reloading from memory countless times and testing different methods of using the device yields something.
Dirty horror experience
Even without this error and the problem of not being able to finish the game, the joy is clouded. There is too much content that slows down the rest of the game to a great extent. First of all, every collectible in the game lacks texture. The first items you come across are notes from former crew members aboard the ship. It's only when you start bumping into other objects that you realize something is wrong. The variety of items increases later in the game, with health-giving foods and tools for you to utilize. These items also lacked texture, just like the earlier items. This is a problem, not a design decision.
Syndrome on the Switch
The non-Switch gameplay shows how bad the rest of the game looks on the Switch. Sure it's playable, but nothing that looks particularly appealing. When you launch the game for the first time, you think, I thought, the aesthetics are intentional, and the game is aiming for a retro atmosphere. On other platforms you will see that this is not the case. In addition to the texture issues mentioned above, there are also issues with lighting and particle effects. This causes gameplay hiccups as there are steam vents that you are damaged. When they're giving off steam, and they're incredibly hard to notice on Switch. Some graphical downgrades can be forgiven and are usually common when it comes to Switch ports, but not when it affects gameplay. Additionally, you'll see graphical elements being downgraded to allow for a smoother gaming experience, but Syndrome still experiences numerous instances of long lag spikes.
The gameplay
Gameplay-wise, Syndrome is mostly fine with no real issues. It's a standard game for the horror game genre, albeit a little too reliant on backtracking. This backtracking becomes a nuisance as it leads to frequent loading screens that can take close to a minute to complete. Much of the backtracking takes place on different floors of the ship, meaning that a new loading screen will appear every time you want to change floors. Since your time on each floor can be very short, this makes the long loading sequences all the more painful.
Died and reloading
By far the worst example of long loading screens is when you die, as this inexplicably sends you back to the main menu. This results in you having to go through multiple loading screens to get to the menu, select your save, reload the game, and then load up to where you were from your last save. This would be a lot of loading time even if loading times were short, but with the length you go through on the Switch version, fatalities can create extremely frustrating loading chains.
Frequent deaths
Unfortunately, death in Syndrome comes fairly frequently since the enemies are so powerful. Combine that with the responsiveness and clumsiness of combat, and the result is scenarios where you'll get killed extremely quickly and have little hope of survival. The game is probably supposed to be played with a stealth mode, but that's not possible. Even if you can sneak a little, enemies will always reveal your hiding place no matter how far away you try to hide, forcing me into a fight where you almost certainly lose.
Conclusion
Syndrome provides no reason to play it in its current state. Even without the game-changing bugs that keep you from completing the game, Syndrome is incredibly unpolished, with obvious flaws. Maybe in the future when patches are released to fix bugs that stop progress it could be something fun.