Syberia

The Good
Steampunk style point-and-click with really nice graphics (just remember it was made in 2002) and fantastic voice acting (one of best I've ever heard in an adventure game).

Village mysteries, steampunk factories, amazing airships and intricate automatons - all this explored by young New York lawyer, Kate Walker.

The Bad
"Syberia" has some shortcomings, namely some annoying unskippable animations (like stair or ladder climbing) and it is quite linear, but the story is so great I would definitely recommend it anyway!

The Bottom Line
GRAPHICS: 8/10 AUDIO: 9/10 GAMEPLAY: 7/10 STORY: 10/10

The Good
The atmosphere is absolutely incredible... this is the first adventure game in over ten years than can come close to Loom when it comes to atmosphere. Beautiful graphics, perfect sound underscore, and a great storyline. Our hero, Kate Walker, is sent to the French Alps to conclude the overtaking of a toy factory and by doing so immerses herself into a mystery that takes her far east into Russia, encountering automatons and mammoths on the way.

The atmosphere is rich and sad at the same time. It reflects the timelessness of a post-war Europe slowly fading away into modern times. Old people reminiscing, abandoned factories, polluted rivers. A very moody and gray game, but it has an undeniable romance to it.

The interface is very smooth, the graphics and sound brilliant. I've heard some complaints about performance - I use an AMD Athlon 2800+ with 512 MB RAM and had no problems, so I cannot comment on that. Thus I give it full grades on the technical side of things.

A nice touch: during the game, you are often called on your cell phone from your boss, your mom, your boyfriend, your slutty co-worker. It has no real relevance on the game, but it's a very well done nice touch. I am reminded of the old Star Trek episode "The Conscience of the King", where Kirk and the antagonist reminisce about a happening on a far planet, and the audience gets so involved in that scene without a single picture being shown. The same here: we get a very good and lively account of things from the half a dozen or so phone calls during the game without ever seeing a scene or one of the people we talk to.

I never got too attached to Kate, our hero... she's very bland but turns more colorful during the game. The being bland is a GOOD thing though because you get less focused on the character and more on the developing storyline... I believe this is what the creators intended. It's completely unlike some of the older adventure games, where the game was designed around Roger Wilco, Larry Laffer, or Guybrush Threepwood. Here the story is the focal point - and what a story it is!

The Bad
Well, it was very linear. The puzzles were either too easy or too complex: since you mainly deal with machines and automatons, a lot of the stuff was guesswork: which lever do I move, which button to push? Also, it seems in the end as if the game was a bit rushed. For example, in the early game, everything was nicely animated. Later in the game, for example when Kate cuts open the cage door, no more animation: you just click with the mouse and it's done. Oh well, the game already occupies 1.1 GB on my hard drive.

Also, even though the graphics are all very nice paintings, there's too many of them, since two thirds of them are just for the flair. If there are three screens between point A and B that serve no purpose other than being nice to look at, that's real good... but when you have to pass between A and B ten times during the game and have to cross all three screens each time, it becomes tedious.

The Bottom Line
If you like adventure games, get it. If you don't, still get it, download a walkthrough from the net, and just play it to follow the fantastic storylines, cutscenes, and painting-like graphics. You won't regret it. Plus, right now you can get the "Game of the Year" edition which comes with an extra CD and includes an interview with Benoit Sokal (the creator), wallpaper, trailers, a poster, and more for around $20. That's well worth the money.

The Good

By now, Syberia has become one of the classics of an almost dead genre. Yet at its time, it was anything but that; it was a mad attempt to breathe life into a corpse. The problem, however, is that this breath of life was, in fact, terribly stale. While the game may be appealing to the newcomer, for seasoned adventure players, it's almost embarrassing. Consider this a rant on why Syberia is not a classic, or even a good game.

First things first, though: the game is gorgeous. The graphics have aged gracefully; the combination of 3D characters and prerendered backgrounds still looks very good (compared to Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey), while the backgrounds themselves are stunning. It's clear the prerendered images were meticulously touched up by hand, with a consistent art style, looking almost like a pencil drawing inked over. FMVs are a different kettle of fish, with wooden animations and a few ugly effects (oh, the explosions!), but the rest of it? Beautiful; and one of the best-looking games I have ever seen.

I also rather like the interface, which is a logical conclusion of the trend adventure games have been following for years: single button point and click. It's barebones, and gives an extremely limited control, but it is a clear, reasonable design decision and as such, I can get behind it.

Sadly, however, it is now time to move to the next section.

Unusually for video games, Benoît Sokal has something of an auteur thing going on in Syberia. He's the lead designer of the game, but also a comic book artist, which explains a lot. As I have said, he certainly can draw, and he has an artistic vision. But he can't really write, and, worst of all, can't design games.

The soul of any adventure game is the writing. None of the true classics became a classic because of its puzzles, or its graphics, or anything else: it was always writing. And this is where Syberia fails tragically; and comic books are perhaps to blame. First of all, the story is simple. The whole thing can be retold in one paragraph, with nothing significant being omitted. American lawyer tries to find a missing, eccentric old man, whose eccentricity is an excuse for populating the world with all sorts of mechanical contraptions. That's pretty much it. It's a story worthy of speech bubbles, but certainly not branching adventure game dialogue. It also doesn't end; and I mean at all. Imagine listening to a story where the narrator suddenly pulls out a watch, looks at it, and says "Alright, so she went outside and there he was, sitting on a bench. Now go home." The ending gives a clear "to be continued in the next issue" vibe; and suddenly we learn the rather large amounts of backstory were just window dressing. Just an excuse to show more pretty pictures.

And regarding dialogue - there's nothing to write home about. There are characters in the game, and they talk. Everything about them is completely forgettable. There is just one exception of a dialogue that stands out: an old sailor who is talking in a hodgepodge of about five languages, curiously interpreted into English by his wife. The more of the languages you recognise, the more hilarious the exchange is. That's all, though, really. The dialogue system is simplistic, with a handful of the same, universal topics for every character, which certainly doesn't add any spice to it. It does the job. Full stop.

This single-purpose writing is actually one of the tell-tale aspects that reveal the true nature of Syberia's game design: things were put in just because adventure games, a genre Sokal has chosen for Syberia, usually have them. Their implementation is entirely superficial and often plain wrong. They are there just because a pure comic book videogame, where you would just keep clicking Next, would be too boring.

Yet this half-hearted implementation of the staples of the genre makes Syberia exactly that: boring. The game world is almost entirely dead. As I have said, visuals triumph here, which means the game is full of gorgeous, yet absolutely empty screens. My conservative estimate is that in about 70% of the game's screens, perhaps even more, absolutely no "gaming" is going on. They are there just to walk through. Every once in a while, a minor character is inserted into such a screen for local colour (and I do mean once in a while; there are about half a dozen of them altogether) who repeats the same mechanical response over and over again. The whole game is incredibly, mind-numbingly static.

And this brings me to the other major point, this one caused by something else than comic book design mentality. It takes a while before the penny drops, but the secret is that while the game pretends to be a classic third-person title, it is, in fact, a Myst clone. Gorgeous, yet empty and dull, fascinated by mechanical contraptions and puzzles that are not a part of the game world, but that exist only to be solved. It's quite obvious, really.

To put it simply, the puzzle design in Syberia is atrocious. It's an almost completely linear sequence of events, some of which are not connected at all yet have to be performed in the prescribed order, with copious amounts of backtracking through dead scenery. The train won't start because you haven't retrieved the MacGuffin yet. The train won't start because you have the MacGuffin in your inventory, but haven't put it in its proper place on the train (and after the train stops again, you'd better pick it up again, because you'll need it). Follow the numbers. Of course it makes no sense for your heroine to waste time doing this or that, but the story can't continue if you don't. The puzzles are not a part of the plot, they are added in, as an afterthought. The consequence, naturally, is that Kate is sometimes forced, by the twisted "there ought to be a puzzle here" logic, to do things in a needlessly complicated manner. There's a puzzle arising from the fact that she isn't willing to jump over a small brook, and another, involving running all over the place and talking to everyone who will listen, just because shooing away three cuckoos is apparently too difficult. The logic of the puzzles is twisted, yet the over-convoluted solutions are usually very apparent, because the extremely linear nature of the game means there simply is nothing else to do. And if the solutions aren't apparent, it's probably because you overlooked a hotspot in one of the screens which there was a good reason to consider useless. It's maddening; and I often caught myself wishing there was actually a "next" button to turn the pages of the comic book, skip a puzzle or two and view some more pretty imagery.

And that, to sum it up, is the sole reason why I can't consider Syberia a classic, its most peculiar characteristic: gameplay for gameplay's sake. It shouldn't have been a video game in the first place, that's what's wrong with it.

If writing is the soul of an adventure game, and puzzles are its flesh and bones, the only thing Syberia has going for it is a beautiful skin. Thinking back, there is nothing memorable about the game at all, except that it is gorgeous. And that's not even remotely enough.