Combining retro visuals and a twist on puzzling solving, Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince aims to deliver a rather innovative gameplay experience. Players will control not one but two characters simultaneously as they attempt to survive various puzzles. Using this mechanic, Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince offers titillating puzzles that keep you thinking every second. Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince is for those who tired of the overly simple puzzle games out there and want a brand-new experience. One part fun and one part challenging makes Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince a game for anyone who like their minds to be tested.

Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince makes players manipulate two characters via a split-screen as they take on various puzzles to avoid ghosts, arrow traps and pitfalls. Pressing left on the arrow keys or on the controller—Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince offers Xbox One controller support just so you know—will cause both characters on both screens to move in tangent. You will need to master this unique gameplay tweak to keep both characters alive as each deal with various obstacles in their path. With more than 30+ levels and bonus levels as well as three different playable heroes, Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince offers up hours of gameplay and a reason to replay each mission more than once.

In Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince, you play as a several souls who end up messing with ancient scrolls called the Symmetry Scrolls. Those who tamper with these scrolls find themselves bound to another soul and their fates become intertwined. If either soul should perish then the one bound to them will also face a similar fate. Journey as one of these three protagonists—the first of your controlled character is a young man named Hero—and proceed through numerous trials for varying reasons. Can you keep not one but two souls alive at the same time? Find out in Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince.

Who doesn’t love a fun puzzle game? The idea of manipulating blocks to fit together or running through various different portals to escape danger—we hope you get these references—make for exciting games that challenge the mind while playing. That’s why one glance at a game called Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince had us here at Honey’s Anime rather intrigued. Rather than simply moving one person through cliché hazards like pitfalls and spike traps, you moved two via a dual screen. We can’t say we’ve played many games like Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince but does this under-utilized mechanic make for an exciting and fun puzzle title? Let us find out as we review Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince.

Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince throws players into the role of Hero and a strange little hooded little creature. Hero recently picked up a dangerous scroll known as the Symmetry Scroll and has become bonded to the hooded being. Now, players must keep both souls alive by using their controllers or keyboards—both can be utilized in Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince—to help them survive numerous challenges. While the challenges themselves seem simple enough, we assure you they aren’t that simple.

As we mentioned above, the main idea behind Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince is in the fact that players control two people at once. That means you could have on one screen, a safe pathway to follow but on the other, deadly spikes that need to be switched off. As you move, the other moves and if either character dies, you’ll have to restart the level. At first it seems simple enough to control two people but the difficulty comes in later when you face puzzles that need you to move fast and accurately. This is where Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince shines brightest is that it doesn’t feel like a tough game because of the area hazards but because you as the player are doing something you’re typically not geared to do in games. Think of the popular Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You and how tough that got when the on screen elements began to ramp up in the later game, that’s what you’ll face in Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince just with less on screen components but oh so tough ones nonetheless.

Besides the cool idea of two characters being controlled together, the other nice concept in Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince is that there are not one but three characters you can play as. While the first character doesn’t have special powers, the other two do with abilities like teleport and magic that can destroy items impeding your progression. These characters are fun to play as but that’s where our one issue with Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince comes into view. If you want to control the two other characters who have cool powers over the main default Hero who has no powers, then you need to beat his campaign first. While the bonus maps give you the means of playing the other characters earlier than the main story, it would still be nice to occasionally switch up who you were controlling especially when you need a break after failing multiple times on a puzzle. Though, we understand why developer Gamera Interactive decided on this execution as it gives players multiple reasons to go through Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince and thus, this is just a minor issue with us and not a large one.

Lastly, we wanted to talk about the graphic and sound for Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince. We seriously love the retro visuals for Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince and the cute designs of the characters. All the maps pop with that great retro look and it helps that the soundtrack mirrors this with some great tunes that remind us of the old gaming days. Even when we die multiple times, we don’t ever mind too much. That just means we get to see more of the adorable characters and that’s a plus in our minds.

Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince is a truly fun but extremely tough puzzle title. Even here at Honey’s Anime, many of us found the manipulation of two characters simultaneously to be both exciting and sometimes frustrating. However, our frustration was never because Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince did something unfair or cruel but instead, because we had to essentially learn something many of us gamers haven’t done before. With over 30+ missions and a dozen bonus missions as well as several characters to play as, Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince offers up quite a bit of gameplay for a nice price. We did wish there was a bit more variety with puzzles and also wished it didn’t take a full playthrough of one story to unlock the other playable characters but these are small issues that don’t detract from what is essentially a fun puzzle title with some really innovative ideas. Just make sure to pack some patience folks as Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince will sometimes get you riled up.

Puzzle games live and die depending on how they challenge players and if they are fun to play. Luckily, Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince meets both requirements to make a fun but tough puzzle title. At the moment, Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince is only $7.99 till December 19th so we do recommend picking it up as soon as you can if you like puzzle games that require you to think outside the box. Are you planning on picking up Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince for the PC and or Xbox One? Comment down below to let us know and for all your gaming review needs keep coming back to our hive here at Honey’s Anime. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to dive back into Fearful Symmetry & The Cursed Prince and see if we can beat more of these puzzles…