Syberia 3: The Complete Journey

Short review: Average game with bad user interface (UI). Really for Syberia fans only. Long review: Having just finished the game I will say I enjoyed my time with Syberia 3. Let me start with the bad stuff, the interface. I found both controller and mouse were both not good and I switched back and forth a lot. Sometimes the curser would just disappear, other times the controller would not pick up the hot spots on screen, generally the interface is slow to register your actions and a bit clunky. After a while I got used to most of it, but you might not. This game was made with Unity by a small dev team so I was not expecting anything amazing from the visuals. They are fine, nothing amazing and nothing ugly. What I did enjoy was the world, puzzles, and music. The game has the same atmosphere that the first two had with empty town streets or a rusted amusement park and more. I liked it. The puzzles were fine. Nothing new for these types of games. The music was very good and added to the atmosphere well. The story was fine. In the end I did enjoy the journey even with the bad controls. In closing, I would only recommend this game to fans of the first two since it has the atmosphere, puzzles, and pace of the first two games. For newcomers, I would urge you to play the other two first and if you like them buy this game.

It's always simple bad decisions that ruin games. Years of studying to gain skills to do what not just anyone can do, but screwing it up because of bad decisions that just about anyone off the street could correct them on. So, the first and most important thing is I didn't finish the game because of a glitch where an item I had disappeared, and the game doesn't allow saves...it just saves the game for you, so no going back to a previous save. Inventory was bad. Camera was bad. People talking when you haven't responded in a few seconds got annoying. When using a controller which is the best option for their gameplay since they catered to consoles, you can't see all the interaction options until you're close. Running yet again wasn't default or a toggleable option. Who walks in these games? Make it default. Can't skip dialog, so if you've heard dialog before, you have to sit through it. A decade and a half after the first game, and there's still slow movements (opening doors, stairs, etc), which was the biggest hindrance in the first two games. Contrast that with something like Myst where you can move quickly instead of spending half the game watching the character get from point A to point B. Completely different play style. Just because it's been years doesn't mean the style has to completely change. Like Matrix 4...why is it that after years the creators just go a completely different direction? Just use the same style and polish it up with modern mechanics and it'll give people more of what they loved. It was made for consoles and whenever you do that, it makes a game worse. If Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, etc was primarily made for consoles, they wouldn't be as good. But they were ported to console later and are timeless classics. If Uncharted was made for PC, the combat would have been leagues better. So would Syberia 3.

Why is it that all the Syberia games feel like they're 80% the way to where they wanted to go? As others have mentioned the UI is just painful. At a few points, I actually said outloud, "I really wish this was an isometric adventure game." It is so hard to navigate. I also just finished Syberia A World Before, and it was better. Full 3D adventure games have a common challenge, and it's moving around. Even one of my favorites, Grim Fandango, had some challenges with navigation and camera angles. The puzzles are much simplier than with one and two. They are more consistent. In most cases everything you need is quickly found. There's no pixel hunting, and honestly, everything makes mechanical sense. You won't be looking for three pieces to put together to make a glue from some random pun from the periodic table. Plus, and this just drops the difficulty some, pieces of the environment are not unlocked until you need to solve them. There's still a decent amount of problem solving, but you won't have 15 items in your pocket that you've collected through the game. A major improvement in Syberia 4 is the directing of the actors. I've gotten so use to hearing Sharon Mann playing a near happy go lucky Kate. After listening to some of her other stuff online, I thought, "Maybe she's just the type of person that sounds happy." Syberia to me is NOT a happy adventure. It's weird, it's messed up, and there's a lot of struggle. In S4, she does not sounds happy go lucky. I enjoyed it so much more just because the protagonist didn't sound like they were flying high all the time. In a way I kind of wish they hadn't made S4. I kind of wish Kate's fate was left to be unknown. In a way I was hoping for a Seinfeld ending. This gal has been "train hopping" for the past couple of years, and she deserves to have someone anchor her in place for a long time. In a way she was, but not permanently. I still don't understand why Kate felt so compelled to keep doing all this weird stuff.

Storywise the game is what you'd expect and what you'd want from it. It's a continuation of the previous games, again with the magical take on real world, focused on the funky tribe with fantastical creatures and the overall nature vs civilization story. Puzzles are alright, in the Syberia sense though, so they can be infuriating or obtuse sometimes, but no big deal. If you play this because you liked the story of the previous games then you'll like this too. However, the techincal aspect of the game is definitely not great. Performance stutters, lighting sometimes goes crazy, camera is wild and sometimes doesn't switch when it should, cursor disappears for a few seconds and you can't do anything, dialogue lines skip sometimes, interaction points flicker and you can't select them, or you can select those that you shouldn't be able to see from the spot you're in and so on and so forth. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I haven't experienced but other players have, because while the cutscenes are fine, the gameplay sure has a ton of issues due to working somewhat poorly with the unity engine (and the engine likely being a significant part of the problem)

Not bad, definitely worth the £3.79 I paid for it. I like Benoit Sokal's games having played both the previous Syberias (really part 1 and 2 of the same game) and Amerzone. This, like those looked good, had an engaging atmosphere and reasonable puzzles. I was less happy the the interface which I found clunky and sometimes unmanagable. Some of the scene transitions took a very long time and Kate Walker sometimes got stuck in a corner. (some of the performance issues may have been due to shortcomings in my PC's spec). There was one bug which locked the game totally which is well documented and is probably not down to my equipment. (In the Metro under the fairground). Perseverance is required to get round this bug. (I shut down all background processes and ran the game with the minimum settings). If you like adventure games and can get it for around a fiverthen I'd go for it.