Syd Sym Review

Syd Sym is a puzzle game based on the often used Match 3 format. Instead of being a typical Match 3 though, it is more of an organizational experience, having you "tidy up" Syd Sym's chocolate factory.

The game starts with a simple chocolate box that Syd Sym drops candy into. It is up to you, the candy organizer extraordinaire, to organize the candy either together in typical Match 3 fashion, or alternately (gummy bear, lollipop, gummy bear, lollipop or GB, GB, LP, LP, GB).

While a typical Match 3 experience would have you grinding out patterns to get a high score, Syd Sym doesn't seem to want you to lose. I've found that in two hours of play, you can just line up the candy from left to right and win every level. The simple way to disrupt this pattern, for the developer, would be to give you more candy types than grid height, but this is not the case. If the box is a 6x6 grid, there will be 6 candies to organize.

Because the candy drops far too slow to lose track of your organization, the game quickly turns into an alternate pattern making showcase, which may in fact be what the developer was looking for. There are 30 patterns to find in the game, with great names such as "The Piano" and "Little Piggy". They are fun to find, and if pattern making is what you are trying to do, the screen does get a bit muddled due to a lack of simple organization.

While pattern finding is fun for a while, the slow nature of the game, along with the near impossibility of losing, makes Syd Sym far too slow for the average gamer. Being a fan of the tower defense genre, I love games that have a slow build-up with a big reward at the end (such as the completion of an impenetrable fortress), but this one doesn't offer much of anything for your hours of work.