Syberia

There are good Adventure games, and there are bad Adventure games, this, in my opinion, is a bad adventure game. First off, let me just say that the story and visuals for Syberia are great, love em. Dialogue is also entertaining, if sometimes nonsensical when you do dialogue choices in a certain order and the structuring of the conversation is designed for a completely different order of dialogue choices. However, this game does what I hate most about its genre, it makes playing the actually game part of this game a boring chore. Firstly, movement and actions are incredibly slow, making moving long distances, and even short treks from one side of the screen to the other quite the drag over time. It gets especially bad when you have to climb stairs of any kind, or perform repeated actions that just grind the pacing like the emergency break is stuck on. It wasn’t bad when I started, but after a while, it starts wearing on me, then it began to annoy me. Secondly, there’s a lot of hollow intractables, intractable items and doors that really don’t do anything. Nothing much to say about it, just like the items themselves. What makes them a problem is that they can be annoyingly confusing, as in adventure games, you’ll be looking for something to interact with to progress, and these pointless intractable things just waste time and focus. It becomes worse when the dialogue of these pointless interactables makes them out to be important, such as in one situation where when interacting with a door that doesn’t open, it says that you need to get in there. Finally, and primarily, the puzzles in the game are just tedious. They lack much puzzling challenge, but what Syberia lacks in frustrating puzzle design like its peers have, it makes up for it in it puzzles challenging your patience. Typical fetch questing that mostly involves walking around and finding objects to use on other objects, gameplay which is made worse by the afore mention crap movement. Once you have all the pieces in play, it’s not too hard to figure out what to do. However, what can be hard is finding all the pieces of the puzzle. Syberia has the hidden object situation, except you can have no clue what you’re looking for, what it looks like, or why you even need it. One early game puzzle is constructing a pair of hands and legs for an automaton, and that’s really all it tells you. Sure you’re also told the model number’s for the parts, but that information is about as useful as a third leg on you head. Thing is, the controls to build the appendages don’t specify what you’re building apart from an arbitrary wood type, which itself is only indicated by color. So all you can do is guess and test until you luck upon the right color of wood, a process which is made ridiculous by the repeated backtracking you have to do back to the automaton, saying, “Is this right? Is this right? Is this right?”, again until you finally get it right. The game has a good story, one I’d really like to experience, but even if I just walkthroughed my way through the game, I still couldn’t get over the molasses speed of it all, and the plain boringness of the gameplay.

Pros: - The graphics hold up, even up to my 2018 standards. The backgrounds are pretty well done although the character models are not so great considering they aren't static. I think the backgrounds are the best quality of this game in certain areas. - Story is interesting. It is not done very well and the ending with the main character you're after doesn't end very well if you ask me but it is imaginitive. - The world is alright. I like the clockwork style of mechanisms but it becomes less special after the first act where the creators seem to have forgotten how to become inventive with their use of clockwork machines as puzzles. Cons: - The gameplay is extremely slow. As a point-and-click adventure, it's to be expected but this one is particularly slow considering the way your playable character turns and goes up steps incredibly slowly. Some particular actions I counted take her a full 10 seconds to complete and during each of these moments, you have no control and can only watch her complete her robotic actions. - The characters aren't great aside from the main character. - The puzzles are meandering. They're generally very easy until you hit a point where the progression halts because you didn't choose one of about 8 dialogue options in a notebook to talk about with a certain character. SPOILERS: (I talked to 3 different characters about berries I believe 6 or 7 times just to gain access to a garden. This probably took about 15 minutes thanks to the slug-like pace the main character takes to get across about 7-10 panels of static camera shots.) Conclusion: This game does not stand the test of time as a point-and-click adventure. I felt enjoyment and wonderment at first but the gameplay and not so great side characters who incessantly call you with B.S. to halt your movement truly suck all fun I had for the first 2-3 hours.

I don't know about Windows version but on Mac screen is stretched and every item on screen and directions to go is marked with an icon which make it unplayable.

Sadly, the game won't start properly on my setup (4k + 1080). It will switch the resolution on the secondary monitor to some smaller one but will draw a black rectangle with nothing in it on the main one. There is completely nothing inside the black rectangle. And nothing will convince it otherwise. I tried both GOG and Steam versions since I have both of them - and both behave the same. I'm not desperate enough to fight with this game just to make it run. Too many other games in queue to play.

After reading about this and seeing the first few screens I was really eager to play it. But I got so fed up with how much time I spent just moving the character around. What is the point of frames where you do nothing but walk through them?! The settings and textures are really beautiful, but after traversing them hundreds of times because the actions you're supposed to take to solve the puzzles aren't exactly logical, even the prettiness of the game wasn't enough to make me like it. The characters are all REALLY annoying, including Kate Walker. What is the point of all the annoying cell phone calls we have to sit through? There could've been a less insipid way of getting across that her life at home wasn't going so well. I also thought a lot of the characters in the game were based on someone offensive stereotypes. Like the "gypsy" characters who speak gibberish and are money-grubbers. I was surprised when the game ended. In the last level I thought it was finally getting a little less insipid and a little more like a good adventure game, where the actions you should take become clear with a bit of thinking. I thought it was finally getting on a roll. Now I will have to buy and suffer through part 2 if I want to get some closure. This could've been so awesome. :-(