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Symon
Summer 2010 Prototype | Adventure | Adobe Flash (Windows / Macintosh)  

Symon is a point-and-click adventure game that takes place inside the dreams of a paralyzed patient. Through exploration of the pensive and sentimental dreamscape, he rediscovers repressed memories and tries to reconcile his troubled past.

The game requires the player to think differently, stepping out of the normal boundaries of conventional adventure game logic. Symon places a heavy emphasis on dream-logic, using memory and concepts of synesthesia to form the (il)logical connections required to solve the puzzles.

Each dream world is populated with characters and objects that represent his broken past. But each time he returns to the dream state, the puzzles are different. Every playthrough is different. While the traditional adventure game is linear and hardcoded, Symon aims to bring a fresh experience through the introduction of procedurally generated puzzles and game-spaces.

Research Question

Symon is an experimental adventure game. The puzzles try to reproduce the odd logic of dreams, where things make sense -- but not quite. This logic becomes the underlying system of the game, which generates new puzzles procedurally whenever you start dreaming. The theme of the game (being in a dream) is therefore embodied in the design of the game, which at the same time aims at introducing replayability in the adventure game genre.

  Symon
Prototype

Go to Website


Recommended Requirements

Symon requires Adobe Flash Player 10.1. The game has been tested on the following minimum hardware configurations:

  • Windows 7/Vista/XP
  • OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
  • Intel Core 2 CPU 1.83GHz
  • 2 GB of RAM

*Game runs best in Google Chrome.

*If thats not possible, do take note that there are known issues when running on Mozilla Firefox 3.5 or below on any OS, Safari 4.0 and below on Mac OSX, and all versions of Safari on Windows.

Screenshots
Poster
Videos
MIT Tech TV
Game Trailer

Research Video (from Game of the Week Podcast, 2011)
Developers

Clara Fernández-Vara
Product Owner

Jason Beene
Game Director

Justin Tan
Game Designer

Anuj Bheda
Assistant Producer

Davier Yoon
Artist

Kevin Laughlin
Artist

Jessica Novellia
Artist

Caroline Sugianto
Programmer

Kang Hean Jin
Programmer

Sam Marshall
Sound Designer

Jason Hwang
QA Lead

Related Publications

Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles in Adventure Games: The Puzzle-Dice System

Blog Posts
Press Mentions

 

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