Syberia: The World Before

Let's starts with the obvious, the game is beautiful with an unique artistic direction. Right at the beginning until the end, the immersion is total. The music and sound design are also really kicking in, with nice moment of music and cinematics well executed. Voice acting is great with the same voices (french here). As for the story, it's good, not as simple and predictable as you can think when you begin to see where the game is going and all the characters are well written. You will not travel as much as in the previous games, but that is okay, because all the effort were but on creating a rich and credible city Vaghen, and it's surronding, where most of the game will take place. Build smaller but better basically. You can see all the love the dev put in the game. The gameplay is like any point and click and the puzzle are quite simple, way simpler than before. That i enjoyed because i was more focused on the story and less in solving riddles. Some blackspot : some moment are rough meaning that the writing could be more demanding. For example, a wooden table isn't a credible shield against a machine gun. etc.. but nothing dramatic. I also had frames drop, so the optimisation could be better. And finally, the camera rotation is not helping espacially in small places. If you liked the previous syberia go for it. If you don't know the games and don't want to play 3 games, (i myself didn't even finish the third, too many bugs) i think you can stil play it. This is a new story, even is there is element of previous game. There is a resume available si you will not be lost.

I went into this game not expecting much, but what i got exceeded my expectations. The Graphics, the atmosphere, the story, are all amazing, i am glad they gone back to point & click beacause the previous game controls and camera were in my opinion pretty bad. The only thing i want to be done better in the next game are the puzzles, i mean some of them were kind of easy. Here is some gameplay to see how amazing this game really is : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjGUtQz_Q4Q

The visuals are incredibly beautiful(no surprise they are the best of the series) with Steampunk European-style architecture locations dripping with delight.(Oscar's new form is a delight) There are even multiple options for "taking in the view" with introspection areas or even just extending the train loading sequences.(ssds be so fast now!) I was very surprised my aging RX580 handled it all on max settings with only a handful of framerate hitches. While it is kind of open-world, freedom is fairly limited but enough to soak in the atmosphere. Camerawork is an extension of what was done in Syberia 3, but much improved. It does sometimes get akward when it doesn't move the way you want, or fast enough for your character, but it is meant to be cinematic/natural. Takes some adjusting. The "points of interest" dots work fairly well, it's too bad they couldn't come up with something that seemed more natural and less artificial-looking, but that would probably end up frustrating players. While there are a few decisions that radiate, the game is meant to be a fairly straight narrative, very much like an interactive movie. The themes are reasonably mature, and while the war/persecution parallels are pretty obvious, the focus is on the emotion of the characters, which I'm glad comes across very well. Puzzle-wize, most are pretty easy, though most of the war stuff I looked up out of laziness. Steampunk mechanical puzzles are the most enjoyable, of course, so that itch gets scratched!

Like many others, I found the visuals to be nice and the audio good. The UI can best be described as annoying. * The camera was often placed at such an angle, that it was difficult to get to the things I was supposed to interact with. This was espacially true in the cemetary, where paths most often was fully obstructed by foreground elements, making it very difficult to get around. * Interacting with POIs was, mostly, fairly trivial, but at times frustrating when I had to inspect something just to inspect another thing in the zoomed-in screen. Sure, sometimes there were more POIs to interact with, once zoomed in, but that just introduced another annoying aspect, where you'd have to go back and forth between different POIs at different levels of zoom, e.g. getting Danas letter from the automaton in Lenis room. * The "look around" feature tripped me up, more than once. One example was in the musical square, where I had to interact with the piano, but then had to look > 90 deg. to the left, to interact with a completely different contraption there. * No way of skipping cut-scenes like the introspection ones, so if you misclick, you have to see the entire scene again. The puzzles were too easy, and though the story was fine (but at times a little silly), I never got the "participation" feeling, so many other point'n click adventures has given me over the years. I migth just as well have had an "Forward" button.

Out of all the Syberia games this one looks the best and plays the best and has the most engaging story. The game's puzzles are kind of easy, but I see that as an improvement over some of the more weird and convoluted puzzles of the previous games that weren't particularly fun or interesting and only slowed down the story. The story has everything the previous games had, with the nature and civilization and mysterious creatures, but this time it shifts focus a bit different way with the historical storyline and allusions. The characters are great, voice acting great, and the story also great. Even if you can sometimes safely guess where it's gonna go, it's portrayed in an enjoyable way. Too bad there probably won't be a final sequel or something. And it's interesting to click on everything and explore even the elements that obviously won't help you progress. Also the music in this game is probably the best in the series too. And on the technical level the game works waaay better than the previous one. No weird camera glitching, character models and environments look great and the lighting doesn't get funky. The character movement also doesn't get weird when running into objects either. Much better gameplay experience than Syberia 3