Red Syndrome

In Brief

Red Syndrome is a single-character rpg about flow. You patrol an abandoned space-base, taking advice from the dubious voice in your head, while you try to push back at an expanding alien force. Using a customizable loadout of in-combat abilities, you shut down sigils that the aliens are gating in from and gradually regain control of the station.

This is not a game that's shy about showing its mechanics, nor is it a frustrating exercise in implicit mechanical design. Red Syndrome plays with all of its gears showing. Everything has a countdown. Some things have a warmup. There's a territory control system which you can reach through the map that dominates most of the menu screen. Items are nonexistent, save for a few keys, and your health refills itself from a reserve bar - the same resource that you deplete to push back the encroaching invasion.

Red Syndrome is unashamedly convenient to play. Autorun is always on. Diagonal movement is enabled. You can jink past encounters with a little bit of skill when you care to. Nothing is ponderous and everything works.

It feels a bit strange for me to be calling an hour-and-a-half rpg masterfully polished, but that's the phrase that springs to mind with Red Syndrome.

The only real critique that I can level against this game is that it could have more. More anything. With a little less polish and a little more crunch, it could have some expansion on its meager story. With a little less balance, it could have a little more variety to its skills. With maybe a handful of lurking passability issues, it could have interaction in its environments - which are currently nothing more than scrolling setpieces.

Red Syndrome is basically just a nice hamburger of a game. It keeps you happy, offers you little resistance, and when it's done you don't feel like you've been a part of anything momentous, but you're content.

That's all broad strokes, though. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty, then let's go deeper.

Mechanics

Red Syndrome has two basic modes of gameplay. The first is zone control, where you're trying to find enemy nodes before they can swamp the center of your map with red, and the second is combat - wherein you dispense that murder.

The zone control portion of play involves navigating a simple Doom maze. Card keys in distant rooms unlock new areas of the map, new areas contain card keys, etc. Skill pickups, your most notable form of progression, are scattered down side corridors or hidden under bosses. The way you arrange your skills into their limited active slots establishes how difficult - or how easy - combat will be for you, and how often you have to duck around encounters to head back to the hub for free heals.

In the event that you've been messing around with grinding for too long, enemy influence can start to creep up to the door of your safe room, in which case you may be forced to burn off some of your reserve hp to shove them back, but this was an element of gameplay that I never encountered. I don't know how long I would have to dally for things to get dire, but the wait would be considerable.

And speaking of waits, let's spend a minute or two on combat. Red Syndome has this down to a perfect science. Everything is balanced. Nothing is broken. Fights consist of you selecting between whichever skills have come off cooldown in your active tray, and then desperately trying to put enemies into the ground before their own attacks are ready. Because of this, combat feels a little bit like bunkering down before a hurricane. You usually have a few rounds to deploy your own abilities and then you listen to the roof shake and pray while you're being walloped really hard. Different enemies mix up their wait timers, allowing the rhythm of combat to change as it goes along, and some monsters can tag you with status effects that shut down either your support or your offensive skills.

Skills come in a good variety, and each category of ability has low-wait, low-reward and high-wait, high-reward options in it. You can set up a mild buff to your defenses that lasts for a while, and do this regularly, or you can set up a high buff to your defenses that shuts out nearly everything, and do this once every never. Or you can do the same with attack. Or you can do the same with increasing your enemies' wait times, if you particularly like winning at games.

Neither the combat nor the zone control in Red Syndrome ever outstays its welcome, and I was curious as a player about how this all might be expanded further. Level progression is minimal in the game, but still present, giving a few extra HP and attack points. Very slight modes of progression (side-grades, gear crafting, persona links) could be an interesting add-in for a longer project, keeping skill-choices as the key feature of combat. At the moment, this is pure armchair dev-ing, but there's plenty of room in Red Syndrome's setting for a bigger project. Quite frankly, I'd love to see that. It could even expand on the -

Atmosphere and Story

- which, sadly, are a little sparse.

Here's the story in one go: you are a likeable screw-up kid who somehow managed to miss your entire colony bailing into space to avoid an alien incursion. A voice in your head requests your help in slamming the dimensional door closed on some squiggly things that are trying to establish a foothold in your reality. As you push back the invaders, you learn some valuable lessons about believing in yourself and the power of friendship. The end.

The space base looks space base-y enough, and the aliens look alien enough, but there's nothing to fill out any minor setting notes during the course of the game. You never find out anything about space society, or about alien homeland, or even about your main character's less pressing hopes and dreams. Does she like reading Sandman comics? Was she really into Egyptology as a child? These questions are unanswered. She serves her purpose in the plot, and she's not written poorly, but you never really connect to her. The same can be said for the other two characters in the story.

If you like your games plot-lite, this shouldn't matter, but I found myself craving even a tiny bit more characterization while I was playing.

So, Should I Play This?

If you can spare an hour or two and plot is not the single driving force that motivates you to play games, then yes. This is a solid concept executed satisfyingly. While playing it, I never got stuck. I never felt like I was wasting time or being forced into a holding pattern by clunky design or getting steamrolled by an encounter due to poor balance and not player fault.

Red Syndrome is one of the single most accessible games I've played in quite a while, and that alone is worth a look from anyone with an interest in design.

I'll re-use my line from the intro here, since it's still relevant. Red Syndrome is a hamburger. Unless you specifically object to its core elements, you're going to have a pretty good time.

And for the price of free, it's a hamburger worth cramming into your hard-drive.