After playing all four games (and replaying Syberia 1 & 2), I still think this is the best of them. I love the solitary atmosphere, the elegiac tone, the post industrial decay, the feeling of a dying world, the melancholic music and the sense of journey. The puzzles are quite logical and not too taxing. The world is unique and is still the most interesting out of the series, with plenty of automatons in all the locations. Unfortunately the pre-rendered backgrounds don’t hold up that well because of what is now a low resolution. Also not so great is how much time you’ll spend watching Kate go up and down the large number of stairs.
Played it for the first time in 2023. I played all the previous entries about 15-20 years ago and wanted to complete the series. The game is not a disaster, but it is quite bland. It is rarely funny and the gameplay is quite tedious because of the 3D controls. A lot of characters from the previous entries make their appearance, but if you don't remember much about them, this is not great. Overall the game requires you to be quite familiar with the events, characters, story and puzzles from the other entries, which I think is a weakness. The graphics hold up nicely if you use mods. I used dgVoodoo to increase the resolution and apply antialiasing. Some of the puzzles don't really make sense or are poorly signaled. I admit that I used the Prima guide for about 10-15% of them. I recommend the game only for completionists.
This is not a nostalgic review. I just finished the game for the first time this year (2020) and it holds up beautifully. Toonstruck has good graphics and a great fully voiced script. The interface is simple and doesn't get in the way of playing. You interact with the environment by left clicking and there is only one action assigned to the cursor. Right clicking produces only some flavour descriptions. It has no paths that lead to a failed game. The difficulty is moderate and there are no absurdly complicated puzzles that only make sense after reading the solution in a walkthrough. Most importantly, the game is FUNNY. If you enjoy absurd situations, cartoon violence, some gross-out humour, puns and light deviant characters, get this game.
This is it. My all time favorite game. The best videogame story I’ve encountered. I have completed over 220 games, I’ve went through Planescape: Torment, Psychonauts, The Longest Journey, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 7&8, KOTOR, Fallout 1&2, the Legacy of Kain series, Mass Effect 1&2, Portal 1&2, Sanitarium, Syberia1&2, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1-3, The Witcher, NOLF etc., but this right here is the gold standard for me. It manages to mix lots of humor and satire with drama and unexpected & underplayed moments of normalcy, sadness and regret. It makes you care for the characters, the world and even that NPC with one repeating line. One of my favorite aspects, criticized in the reviews at the time, is how slow the epic part of the story starts. You’re a loser, unsympathetic, incompetent, probably alcoholic detective that is scraping for a job on a half-dead dirty planet. You’re not saving anyone, not even yourself, but the first hours serve as a great initiation, a bonding experience that’s transforming you into a somehow normal citizen of Anachronox, one that knows its people, secrets, places and failures and is worried only for his paycheck and the quality of drinks. So when things will start to go crazy (and I mean CRAZY!), you‘ll be doubly surprised: as a player and as a normal inhabitant of Anachronox. While progressing through the game a lot of things will change, but most importantly the characters will change, grow, surprise you and sometimes bitterly disappoint you. But there’s much more to this game than the story. The music is outstanding and I still regularly listen to 6 of the tracks. It usually provides a counterpoint to the mostly humorous story, underlying a sense of sadness visible in every part of the world. The voice acting is top notch and the delivery of cutscenes is still superior to a lot of current AAA games. Technically speaking, because of the Quake 2 engine, the game doesn’t seem released in 2001 (Max Payne! Serious Sam! GTA3!), looking more like 1998-1999, but with a few tricks and a LOT of artistic sense, this is still an immensely beautiful and fascinating game to look at. While the only resemblance that the story has with JRPGs consists in its linearity, the gameplay is much more related to its Japanese source of inspiration: turn-based, action timer, special skills etc. I think it works quite well and is superior to its peers because of the great camera movement. The game has mostly no random encounters (I actually remember only one short area where random encounters happen) and very few zones where you need to fight enemies every time you need to pass through there. Fortunately there’s no grinding in the game and at some points you might even wish for more fighting, to test those cool new attacks. Oh, don’t play the game on Easy, because it will just transform the fighting into a series of impossible to lose cutscenes. :) The game is really easy even on normal, so if you’ve ever played a JRPG or Mass Effect on normal, select the Hard difficulty. I must say that the game is not flawless. You’ll encounter some frustrating moments, strange puzzle logic and technical limitations, but nothing that’s going to do much harm. I love this game. I love everything about it. It’s funny as hell, amazing, surprising, sad, beautiful, humane and full of heart. PS: The soundtrack is available as mp3 tracks in the game folder. Tested the game on Windows 7 x32 and Windows 8 CP x32 with an AMD Athlon II x2 250 and GeForce 460; everything seems to be working fine.
