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.

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. :-(

I want to love this game, I really really do. The storyline is refreshingly original, the characters are compelling, and Kate's development throughout the story is incredibly well done. I loved every bit of the plot. That said, as an adventure game, it falls flat. The puzzles aren't puzzles so much as fetch quests. Almost every problem boils down to "x is missing! go find it!". The only challenge lies in scouring each screen for items - the game tells you, each time, exactly what you need to find or do. There's very little lateral thinking involved. This is incredibly frustrating given the setting - you're on the trail of a mad toymaker, surely there should be some kind of fiendish mechanical puzzle to solve? - and left me with an overall feeling of wasted potential.

After hearing so much good things about Syberia and being in a mood a for a good adventure point and click game I decided to give Syberia a try. What a disappointment it is and a big one at that. Story You play as Kate Walker, a lawyer. You travel to a little town in Europe to the mission of completing a deal to buy a Toy Factory which actually makes automatons, which seem like robots but a little different as the game explains it, or tries because it doesn’t really explain it. Here we can begin pointing out one of the first of the many problems of the game, nothing is explained to you. The developers create a setting that is different from the usual, so if anything they should try to immerse you in it. One good way to do it would be to explain to you how some of these particular things are, how they work or pretty much anything interesting about it but no, better to be left in the dark, I guess. The story itself is boring and bland. Without spoiling anything while trying to settle the deal for the purchase of this factory you learn about some of the history of some characters. Bare in mind that those characters are either dead or you have not yet met them. To give the game a little credit, this is by far the best part of the game, the backstory of what happened years ago. Of course the game wouldn’t present it to you in a interesting manner, that would be asking too much, instead you are presented with a book to read. About 10 pages or more. It’s not that bad but as it is the best part of the game and the only thing that gives context to many of the stuff that you see and some puzzles one would thing they would do a better job at presenting it. With a boring scenario and story that leaves us to the characters and I’m sorry to say, they’re also just as bad. First, your main character, Kate Walker. She is alright at best. You don’t get much room to see her being relatable but at least she’s not annoying not anything. There are however some things that could make her seems better as everynow and then you get a cellphone during the game as people in your life want to talk to you, be it your boss, boyfriend, friend or mother. The problem here is that when talking to pretty much any of these people, when you think it would help to create Kate’s character, it does, but in an opposite way one would hope. Everyone gets the last word with her, it almost makes you feel sorry for her being kind of stupid and helpless and aside from her friend, every person that calls her seem boring. There are also the characters you meet which believe or not are even worse. One of the first characters you have to interact with is a retarded kid which tags along with you for while and you can guess how much depth he has… zero. This only goes on and on with every character which are boring to the extreme with the sole exception being the robot/automatron Oscar. He seems to be the only interesting and creative character of the game and lo and behold, the only interesting character in a point and click adventure game is a robot. Not your character, not anyone you meet but a robot. Music What music? It seems the game does have some music but it barely plays. Most of the time you are walking around in a complete silence with only the marvelous sound of your footsteps. Occasionally some music does play and it is beautiful but it’s so rare you barely forget there is any music for about 90% of the time you’re playing. Graphics The environments do have a nice mood to it. They look nice, of course, understanding this game is some years old but despite of that, the game does look nice. What its’t nice, however, is that every item, door, or pretty much anything you have to interact seem to be hidden behind some huge amount of crap in the front of it or some horrible camera angles that obscures anything worth noting. I do appreciate when developers take the care to not make items stand out so much they are almost shinning in contrast to the background but here they made sure to make it virtually invisible. Most items you can only probably notice when mousing over them, otherwise you would probably miss them entirely. Gameplay With all that out of the way, it leaves us to gameplay and partially continuing what I was saying about the graphics, when you can’t see anything in a point and click game, you can imagine how the gameplay is gonna be like. This is the killer for me. Everything is a pixel hunt and that only helps to make the gameplay slow. Talking about slow, how about mentioning the movement speed our main characters walks? Let me just say, it’s so slow you can probably do something else while she walks from screen to screen and to add to it, there are a ton of screen to walk around with barely anything worthwhile to do, look, or experience. It seems like it’s padding to make the game seem longer than it actually should be. In fact, it seems like every action Kate does is in slow motion, like climbing a set of stairs, for example. Depending of the stairs they seem to take about 5 to 15 seconds just so she can climb it and another 15 seconds to climb back down. Did I mention there’s a ton of backtracking in this game. Well, then get ready to have fun walking super slow back and forth and waiting for the slowest of the animations to get anywhere. Only thing left to mention is the puzzles and by god, they are among the worst I’ve seen. Most of them feel like they are completely random, especially when you are giving pretty much zero indication about how to proceed. Recently I’ve heard of the term “moon logic” and I think it is the perfect way to express my perception of the puzzles in Syberia. They have no logic one could think of unless they lived in the moon or maybe the crazy world from Alice in Wonderland. Overall I’ve played games that take a while to begin, many adventure games and visual novels suffer from that, the problem with Syberia is that it never gets anywhere. I love puzzle games when they have some thought put into them. Sometimes, you play a game in this genre but one of its aspects leaves something to be desired, a game may have some weird puzzles but a good story, bad story but with good characters, weird characters but nice music, etc. The problem with Syberia is that for me it did everything wrong.