Discover the legacy and embark on the journey to Amerzone.
Buy now!
All four Syberia Games are available in the Syberia Collection at a bargain price!
Kate Walker, a young ambitious lawyer from New York, is handed what seems to be a fairly straightforward assignment. Just a quick stopover to...
Discover the legacy and embark on the journey to Amerzone.
Buy now!
All four Syberia Games are available in the Syberia Collection at a bargain price!
Kate Walker, a young ambitious lawyer from New York, is handed what seems to be a fairly straightforward assignment. Just a quick stopover to handle the sale of an old automaton factory hidden in the alpine valleys, then straight back home to New York. Little did she imagine, when embarking on this task, that her life would be turned upside down.
On her expedition across Europe, traveling from Western Europe to the far reaches of Eastern Russia, she encounters a host of incredible individuals and locations full of extraordinary machines and an amazing atmosphere. In her attempt to track down Hans, the genius inventor - the final key to unlock the secret of Syberia - she will traverse both land and time on a journey that will throw all that she values into question, while the deal she sets out to sign turns into a life-changing experience.
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.
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).
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.
This is truly a marvel of adventure gaming. It features unforgettable sounds and visuals, also, it tells quite a story. If you play it, don't rush it.
BTW contrary to popular belief, Syberia is a standalone story. It ends in definitive moment while leaving something to our imagination. Just like a good book. Playing Syberia 2 is optional, however, it is fantastic to play both back-to-back.
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.
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