“Every great dream begins with a dreamer.” – Harriet Tubman

Symon is an experimental point-and-click online game about the power of dreams created by Gambit of the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. Symon was also an Indie Game Challenge 2011 winner alongside games like Limbo and Inertia.

As I have mentioned, dreaming is the underlying theme of the game Symon. Starting the game we meet Symon. A man who has been in a hospital bed so long, he’s forgotten what the outside world looks like. Dreaming is his only release from the insanity that can occur due to overexposure to the sterile smell and constant beeping of his hospital room.

Clicking and holding a mouse button, we enter Symon’s dream, his escape. As Symon, we walk through his dream world traveling through doors that lead to other parts of the dream, all the while learning more about him as he dreams.

Have you ever been dreaming and everything within the dream makes perfect sense at the time, yet when you wake you wonder what on Earth was going on back in your dream state?

This is a common experience, because dream logic is different from the ‘real world’ logic. The most mundane experiences within a dream may seem completely absurd once you wake.

Keeping with the theme of dreaming, this aspect is seen throughout the game as Symon, still in his patient gown, journeys through his dreams filled with his broken memories of the past as well as his wants, desires, and hatreds.

Everything in Symon’s dreams include aspects from his life before the hospital. Such as a child he either has or had. Which can be seen through different things throughout the dream, including a baby incubator and others, in the dream, speaking about getting the nursery together for the baby.

While in each dream, there is always a goal that Symon is trying to accomplish. As the player, you must solve different puzzles in order to get items that meet Symon’s goal. One of these goals, as I have mentioned before is putting together the nursery for the baby.

Although there are only three main ‘dream goals’ that can be accomplished when Symon dreams, each time you enter the dream the world is different. This includes the puzzles that need to be solved to acquire the items that Symon desires. If you were to play the game again, the way you accomplish the goals and the people/things you meet along the way will be different. There may be similar things that appear from dream to dream, but they serve different purposes. This keeps up with the metaphor of the dream as it follows dream logic and the fact that most if not all dreams are not completely the same.

As a side note, Symon does a great job of portraying the absurdities and irrelevances that are often riddled throughout dreams. For example, playing through the game I came across a man-eating plant and a large frog on crutches. Very odd and irrelevant at first glance most definitely.

Once you retrieve all of the items Symon is searching for, you are finally allowed to pass through a door that was previously locked. This final room of the dream takes on a more realistic look and feel, leading me to the assumption that this room may be an actual memory, rather than the broken memories from earlier rooms in the dream. Something that connects Symon back to his life before the hospital.

Leaving the final room wakes Symon up and the player then notices a picture on the once bare wall that portrays a piece of Symon’s life reminiscent of the goal that was accomplished in the dream. After putting together the nursery for the baby, a picture of a woman, who we can assume is his wife, holding a baby appears on the hospital wall.

The more you play through the game the more the dream logic makes sense to you, as strange as that may sound.As a player, you continue to learn things about Symon and are able to solve the puzzles quicker as their relevancy becomes more apparent to the situation.

Interestingly, the narrative of the game is a puzzle itself as you slowly piece together the story of who Symon is, while traversing through his dreams. In a sense, we are discovering who Symon is, as he rediscovers himself. I love this aspect the most about Symon. Its distinct take on the usefulness of dreams. Most would not think that dreams have the potential to be useful in helping someone. Yet as we come to see in Symon, the potential is there. Symon uses his dreams to reconnect himself to his past and possibly uncover lost and repressed memories. It is a noteworthy idea that I have yet to see before and would love to see more of.

I am not entirely sure what everything in Symon’s dreams mean, especially in regards to his life and I am okay with that. Dreams are personal. Something that each and every one of us can call our own and never have taken from us. Dreams are also not always meant to make sense, merely something to experience. For this reason you should give Symon a try. It’s a quick play-through and an uniquely different experience that deserves to be shared.

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