Syberia

I can't recall an other game where I found the walking so tedious. Yes, the world is pretty enough for a game from 2002 and the Art Nouveau stylised buildings are gorgeous but all that walking back and forth is mind-numbingly dull, even at double-click speed. Then there are the stairs . . . so many stairs, all of which the character takes soooo slowly. Aaaaaargh. The dialogue grates with me, it is in my opinion poorly written. There comes a point where (attempts at) jokey dialogue just turns into flippant banality and Syberia overshoots that point by a mile. Throughout the game your character gets calls from various people, supposedly to create back-story and flesh out the whole thing. I find them completely uninteresting, unnecessary, gimmicky and a total waste of time and am grateful to have the ability to fast-click through them. The puzzles, because of the tediousness of the walking, quickly turn into chores. A good example of this is the puzzle involving the Cuckoo birds: ***BEGIN SPOILER*** You need to climb to a higher level to get an item for a puzzle but birds are blocking your way. You later find out from a book that the birds like a certain grape so a new puzzle is now to get this grape to lure away the birds. At first every character you speak to says they know nothing about the grapes. If you ask the professor he tells you to ask the station master who denies all knowledge and walks away. You then, counter-intuitively, need to ask the station master AGAIN who now tells you to ask the professor, so back to him you go. He now tells you to ask the rectors (who if you asked them previously would have said they know nothing about it). They then tell you to go back to the station master who will now open the door to the garden with the grapes for you. All this back and forth feels like EONS of walking and walking and walking and stairs and stairs along the same bits of scenery over and over again. Aaaaaargh ***END SPOILER***

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.

buggy mess

I know with older games, you should expect there to be certain... anomalies, when getting them to work, or during playing. Being an older game, newer graphics cards (mine being an R9 390) are not likely to be supported, thus you may very well be greeted by an error message on launch. But even after applying the only fix that seemed to be available, half of the games visuals were displayed as black shapes. I wish I were able to play this game, point and click are the games I live for.

I liked the start of the game but it quickly became slow, boring and clunky. It also doesn't work properly with dual screens, which added to the frustration. The game was fun until the next task is unclear, at which point you waste time slowly running from screen to screen trying to find out where you need to be. This turns an interesting game into a very slow and boring one. The puzzles at the start are very simple. I'm not sure if the later puzzles are better, but there was no real challenge presented and it seemed like most of the game was spent walking around and listening to dialog. The story seems interesting so I will give it an extra star for that.