izigame.me

i wish i could like this game... palindrome syndrome isn't really anything to write home about, but that doesn't make it bad by any means. i can tell that the dev had fun with this game and for a time, so did i! however, without any pros to outbalance its cons results in an overall forgettable and dissatisfying experience. by the end i got fed up with how lazy and contrived the last few puzzles are (this game is not good enough to try to make me sit there and solve a cipher... especially with how obvious the answer is with or without it) that i just used the guide
namely, my main issue with palindrome syndrome are the puzzles. while they aren't all that hard, the problem is more so that several puzzles (particularly in the last two rooms of the game) provide the player with either not enough information or straight up wrong information, making them impossible to solve without an external guide. try not to rely on the creator's guide either—several of the solutions are misleading and fail to explain the reasoning behind their logic (or, in the case of the techlab lever puzzle, the answer is again just wrong)
the writing isn't the strongest either and the grand culmination of everything is almost immediately obvious from the introduction of the plot but i think it definitely had potential... i personally enjoyed the implications of it a lot, at least :P
i find it very funny that the protagonist sealed himself off in his spaceship as punishment for failing to save his wife, going so far as to apparently reprogram what i imagine is the ship's ai to carry out this directive. this dude has crafted himself his own personal psychological torture chamber over a tragedy he had no control over. i do really like this though and i can appreciate being dropped in the middle of the story—we have no idea how long it's been since margaret died or how long and how many times john's ran this loop, all the while john's trapper teases him that he can't even remember his wife as he slowly pieces together his own guilty confession to her "murder". holy hell. it kind of goes hard
yet... for how fast this game blazes by it's almost comical to leave john with no time to even contemplate why he would do this to himself (other than that his evil self on the mic says he has to) just to hop back into the cryo chamber and freeze himself again. what was the purpose of all of that then if he's just going to go straight to sleep???
and lastly, while this is more of a nitpick than anything: my screen gained a dark red filter after loading my save which, if intentional and not a bug, didn't add anything to my experience outside of making it slightly more and unnecessarily annoying to solve color-based puzzles and examine environmental clues. i can see why it could be intentional as part of the narrative, however it's just a weird design choice that adds more to accessibility issues than it adds to the environmental aesthetic