Syberia II

Story: 3/5 Worldbuilding: 2/5 Art Design: 5/5 Graphics: 3/5 Sound: 3/5 Gameplay: 2/5

If you watch this on youtube this would be a superior experience to playing it, which annoys me hence 2 stars. Issues are: - Slow walking animation - Entering/exiting area wastes more time in unskippable animations - Some diagrams can't be carried with you, so you would need more retractions across the level to solve puzzles (which test your patience with slow walking/entering/exiting) Its a good experience with a walkthrough.

Beautiful to look at, but gets really bogged down in the middle by really hard to find hidden objects in a large area, which means a lot of tedious trudging back and forth until you finally find the objects.

After finishing part one yesterday, I knew I had to pick up part two after reading some reviews. I was a bit sad that part two was not as long as part one. There's a decent amount of areas, but there are fewer cast members, and the job subplot is worthless. It was still worth at least 10 hours of game play. Even though there's more pixels, I did experience some interesting glitches. None of the character mouths moved correctly. They always moved way too quickly. During Act 3 after getting a mask, all characters walked two times as fast. Kind of a benefit going between scenes. I also noticed that dialog would get cut off for most characters after the half way point. The puzzles are still fairly simple, and the items you need aren't hidden too much. Except in Act 3. It's like someone decided, let's stop putting things in plain site. Then they decided not to give any clues, or maybe I didn't find them, for the end game puzzle. Took me almost 30 minutes to hunt and peck my way through it. Aaaah adventure games. Good times! So, I give this a two for keeping the play style the same, good creative direction and over all look. The wrapping up of the subplots is God awful. I know we're using the phone as a device, but really, cell phones working in the tundra of Siberia? Come on. This was also one of my challenges with part one. The subplots are just crammed down your throat whether you like it or not. Though, in the first game, one of the other characters is used in a puzzle. So, there is that. I don't know. I just really hate the cell phone.

One of my main gripes with Syberia was the amount of time you spend watching the main protagonist pause in front of a staircase before slowly ascending/descending said staircase. This didn't need to be animated. Watching someone slowly traverse stairs is not interesting. Especially with the amount of backtracking I had to do in that game to find pixel-sized plot items for a puzzle on the other side of the current area. More out of a desire for completionism than anything else, I started the second game after completing the first. One of the first things that happens in the very beginning of the game is watching the main character pause at the top of a small staircase off a train car and then slowly descend it. Maybe I'll come back to this someday, but right now my time is taken up by more pressing matters, such as watching water boil or staring at the walls contemplating my life choices.