Syberia

Syberia is an exquisite game that follows its own paths in a well-trodden genre. As a piece of playable illustration art, which I think is its intent, it is a sparse and lovely experience. The game is really all about the painted scenes and gorgeous environments imagined by Benoit Sokal. He's a comic artist of the Metal-Hurlant (Heavy Metal magazine) sort, and his games are like little vacations: expeditions for the eye and mind through strange, windswept places cluttered with hulking, abandoned equipment and empty buildings fallen from favor. This game is not about inventory management or feats of timing; as attorney Kate Walker coming to Europe to finalize the sale of a toy factory, your play process instead is about experiencing a quiet story that builds itself up out of the background. As Kate moves further into her journeys, she pulls away from her home life: cell phone calls from home with her fiance, her boss, her best friend, and her mother show how her travels create personal distance as well as geographic distance. The puzzles are spare, and the settings are gorgeous but for the most part inert. This isn't a game that encourages or rewards poking and clicking and opening things. It's a game about a trip through odd unknown lands, and we're along to watch the ride. In this way it's like Sokal's earlier game, Amerzone, which is set in the same gameverse as Syberia. My advice: play the game that Sokal has made, rather than the one you think he should have created. Syberia is a different take on the mouse-driven adventure genre. It dances to its own tunes.

I'm a big fan of old SCUMM and similar adventure games (as well as text adventures before that), so was expecting to enjoy this, based on all the reviews. Instead I was very disappointed. I thought I'd add a negative review as a counterpoint to all the positive ones. All of the "puzzles" were in fact glorified "I spy" activities - you'd have an obvious location to click on, and would need to find a nearby object to use, which involved rolling the mouse over the (very pretty) background until the cursor changed from a pointer to a hand. Compare this to games like "The Secret Of Monkey Island" where you have to combine several objects and locations according to often intricate and twisted game logic. I also didn't enjoy the story/plot, feeling it tried to be "grown up" without being good enough to compare to an actual novel(la). But obviously that's pretty subjective. Finally, I thought it was too short. In summary, despite great production values, I wouldn't recommend it to fans of complex adventure games.

This is one of the things I had to ask myself before stepping into this game. This question, posed by one of the game's central characters towards the end, is certainly sums up the hesitations and fascinations I've always had looking in from the outside of the adventure game genre. I didn't grow up on adventure games, or at least, not the typical 2D point and click or text-based offerings espoused by the Sierras and LucasArts of yesteryear. No, I got into edutainment titles as a kid whose parents never got him a console proper until the PSOne. With that came a copy of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy VII, and with that single game, my expectations for the possibility of the gaming medium changed considerably. Now, what do edutainment titles or FF7 have to do with Syberia? One the one hand, the former were point and click affairs with logic puzzles and a healthy dose of text-based exposition behind them. You actually learned a thing or two about the real world. On the other hand, FF7 was pure techno-fantasy, a sprawling world full of varying dangers, seductions, curiosities and everything in between. Final Fantasy's characters felt fleshed out, from the principal cast to the NPCs roaming around, the world felt inhabited and was backed up by a wealth of history and culture. Syberia has solid adventuring mechanics (that is, point and click gameplay). For a relative newcomer to the adventuring genre, it felt like just the right amount of puzzle solving. Where Syberia really shines however, is in its world-crafting; the whole feel of the game's environs is credible and thought out. The much lauded steampunk trappings permeate the entirety of the world. There's no frenetic smorgasbord of visual cues as in FF7, but the consistency and ways in which the technology and the myth behind the technology is employed in Syberia provides just as much wonder and charm as the everything-goes approach Squaresoft adopted for their own game. In short, despite its modest parameters as a "videogame", Syberia really is a great example of the 'games as art' proposition many are putting forth these days. It truly is an adventure from one conversation to the next, from one town to the other, from one train ride to the next stop. Now, if I had to extend this super long review and nitpick, here's where 'Syberia the game', and not so much 'Syberia the experience', falls flat. Gameplay wise: Kate moves slow. Sloooow. She moves around like a turret and there's animations for even the most mundane actions. There's also an epic amount of backtracking--especially if you're new to the adventuring genre and missed a few pixel hunts a few screens back. While this kind of backtracking lends the movement of the game some kind of time-scaling, it is frustrating enough to occasionally make you moan and sigh. True, the pixel hunting I'm told isn't so bad (as far as this entry in the genre goes), but it still caused me to look up walkthroughs once or twice only to realize I hadn't failed the logic of a puzzle, but that I simply didn't look and click on something somewhat slyly concealed. Other nitpicks: You will occasionally run into some typos with the subtitling and in-game items. Voice work accents for one or two characters is inconsistent. Music occasionally drowns out the dialogue despite setting the corresponding dials properly. And I experienced a crash or two while playing on XP (remedied by switching to compatibility mode for 98/Me).

Theodicy, attempting to explain why God created a world not devoid of evil, usually states that the world is only perfect as a whole. Leibniz elaborated on this perfection, by stating that it is the biggest possible variety in the smallest space possible. Because of this - I highly doubt he would have enjoyed Syberia. I approached the game with high expectations, but also a lot of enthusiasm (which, as we know, helps leniency). Being the inquisitive and thorough gamer that I am, I scoured every location for exits and items and double-checked every dialogue option on every character. To my amazement - I discovered that the game features LOTS of VERY distinct items I can't use, pick up of look at, characters with one (or LESS) line vocabulary and locations that serve NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER, being merely eye-candy. We all know the sad consequences of such a focus - the game is from 2002, so my titular analogy (self-explanatory, I hope) just gets more and more true as the time goes by. The story really doesn't help, because most of the "why" questions you might ask can only be answered with either "Why not ?" and "Because he/they can". The characters are bland, shallow and can easily be viewed as mere tools in overcoming obstacles. You don't care about their lives, because they are pitiful, insipid and most of all - unresourceful. They're either hopelessly stuck or in a downward spiral. Oh - and they're lifeless and unimaginative (both as people and as characters). The best proof is that the most lively, driven and witty person you meet is an elderly ex-singer. I kid you not. Also - don't hope for any optional content you can miss. Other than the things required to advance the storyline, the game has basically nothing to offer. Along the way, our heroine is also bound to receive a few phone calls from work as well as from friends and family. This gives us an exciting opportunity to learn about her personal and proffesional life, right ? Character development and all that good jazz ? As scary as this might sound - those are the most painful in-game moments I have experienced. Our call list boils down to four people. * The boss is more and more pissed off at our inability to get the job done. Our quirky vacation/adventure isn't exactly his preferred modus operandi and he doesn't hesitate to point it out. * The mother has the voice of a stereotypical mother-in-law and, believe it or not, she's even more annoying. You're flooded with her monologue dealing with unremarkable nonsense and, to top it all, details of her elderly erotical life. This just screams TMI... * The boyfriend is a self-centered, boring jerk with a huge sense of entitlement, cartoon-like jealousy and extremely weak idea of loyalty. He has the personality of a grown-up jock in a suit. * The "friend" is an airheaded ditz our character knows from work. Her hobbies include shopping, clothes and men. No, I'm not making this up, nor am I embellishing the truth. This leaves us with one person to describe - the main character. What we learn about her, we do from her interactions with the outside world and the people she knows (there's little to no mental monologue we all know and love). The latter certainly doesn't impress - take a look at the list above and imagine her life before the events in the game begin. What's even worse is that her reactions to the phone calls are, albeit in a very courteous way, variations on "I don't give a ***" and "F*** off", making you wonder whether it was the last straw or has she been dealing with this stuff that way for a while now. The former (seeing her interact with the world) can be irritating at times - at one point, for example, she refuses to pick an object up because it has been lying in a crystal-clear river for some time, making it "dirty and wet". If you think the solution would be to make it clean and dry - think again. We simply pick it up with SOMEONE ELSE'S HANDS. A few moments later remarking that we feel a lot like an adventurer. Back in the day, adventure game heroes asked for help when there was NO WAY to overcome the obstacles they were facing... That leaves us with the gameplay itself, the deep core of adventure games - the puzzles you come across. Unfortunately, they're clockwork-like predictable. You see a thing missing, you find it, place it back - done. What's worse is that you usually don't get much indication as to WHAT exactly you are supposed to do, and more importantly - a partial success will give you the same response as a total failure. Call it nitpicking, but I think you should rather get an encouriging response, telling you that while you're not there YET, you're pretty darn close, so you should keep trying. If either the characters, the plot or the gameplay were interesting enough to keep entertained, I would've rated Syberia a 4 and said it was good, but not the greatest. The hellish mixture where everything is surprisingly average yields a score of 3, for an average adventure game.

Syberia (and its sequel) is a true work of art. There are many ways to tell a story. A book, a movie, a photograph. And an Adventure Game -- which combines elements of all of these and more. Few do it better than Syberia. When it appeared, even gamers who favor other genres were impressed and it nearly single-handedly revived interest in the the adventure genre and showed once again what could be accomplished. It is a classic and not to be missed. I own several boxed copies already and yet I will be adding the GOG version as well - because DRM free GOG games are the pinnacle for any serious gamer. If you like PC Gaming, you don't want to miss Syberia.