Syberia

The Good
Syberia is, simply put, breathtaking. It's not the graphics (see negatives below), but the sheer creativity and attention to detail that went into how the game is built; the amazing depth and consistency of the renderings, the slow, subtle buildup of the music, the way everything is put together is nothing short of cinematic brilliance.

The back story is also fascinating and unique; a cross between an Indiana Jones-like sense of awe and adventure, a fantasy world bordering on the plausible, and a narrative the flits back and forth between fantasy and reality convincingly. Finally, Syberia conveys a true sense of desolation; not oppressive and agoraphobic, as in Fallout, but rather lonesome, sad and beautiful. From a purely audiovisual standpoint, Syberia utterly oozes atmosphere.

The Bad
Unfortunately, Syberia has significant shortcomings, and fails to capitalize on lessons learned from previous adventure games. The gameplay consists of the routine "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" detours, which is fine, but does so in an infuriatingly linear way. There are no multiple quests to keep you interested, and very few intellectual challenges, so the player's involvement is essentially reduced to a "go there, do this, go back, do that, talk to the guy, go to the other side of the current map" routine which becomes badly predictable after the first episode or two.

Worse still, puzzles come in either the woefully obvious verity, with a lot of unnecessary walking and dialog to fill the blanks; the annoying sequence puzzles where you have to do very specific things at a very specific order (which may or may not make sense); or, and this is probably the worst adventure game anti-pattern I can think of (a leaf unfortunately taken from the pages of The Longest Journey), pixel hunting puzzles. The detailed but static graphics are actually a detriment here, with important objects dissolving into the background and easily missed. This leads to a routine of moving the mouse back and forth over the screen area in order to make sure no clue is missed, which leads to boredom and hurts suspense of disbelief.

Lastly, the game mechanics mostly work but, given the repetitive and far-reaching nature of the puzzles, can become insanely annoying after a time - moving from screen to screen takes forever, there's no way to skip non-cutscenes such as climbing a ladder, the inventory system is not particularly effective and there's no notepad or dialog history, which means you need to keep notes (even phone numbers!) manually. For any game, this is an annoyance (unless there's an actual intellectual challenged involved; Star Control 2 is pretty much the only example I can think of); for a 2002 game, this is simply inexcusable.

In the nitpicking section, I have to add that the graphics (not the art - the actual in-game graphics) are disappointing for the game's age. The characters only look somewhat believable, the resolution is low and everything is too static; computers back then certainly had enough horsepower to handle a little more detail and move moving objects. There may have been budget constraints here, but suspense of disbelief suffers accordingly.

The Bottom Line
Ultimately, Syberia is a modern version of Myst: beautiful, well-made, certainly a labor of love but ultimately a flawed game. Well worth the sixpence you can get it for nowadays, but I would have been gravely disappointed had I paid full price back in its heyday.

The Good
This is an exceptional game, and not for the reasons you might think. As a game, it is abominable, completely linear, with absurd puzzles, and so on. And yet I loved it, and I see, from other reviews, that all those who have played it have been swept off their feet too.

Why? There is nothing special about the graphics. The scenes are a series of rendered backgrounds which you cannot pan unlike, say, Exile (Myst III). The camera is set and unmovable for each scene, only Kate Walker (that's you, gamer) and her occasional side-kick move against the background. Nothing to write home about.

The gameplay is abominably linear. Don't you dare even think of doing this until you are allowed to, after having done that.

So? So where is the magic? (It is a magical game).

So where is it? Hidden. When you play "Myst" you cannot hold back a "WOW!" of wonderment. Not so here. The "WOW!" is there, but subdued. There is nothing alien at all about those landscapes, that architecture, even those clockwork automata. But everything is... unfamiliar, yes unfamiliar enough, to wrench you out of this our world into the world of Syberia, without fully realizing how, or why.

What else? Oh, that is the one. Kate Walker (you, gamer) slowly grows in understanding and in wisdom. By the time it is time for her, her mission fulfilled, to fly back to New York, to her job as a lawyer under a perfect arsehole of a boss, back to make up, perhaps, with her perfect arsehole of a boyfriend, and back to her harebrained pain-in-the-bum of a mother, you just know that she will kiss good-bye to the "good" life for the frozen barrenness of Syberia. And that is where the story, the game, becomes a morality play. Kate takes to her heels to catch the Syberia-bound clockwork train which is leaving right now. Running like mad through the dining room of the Grand Hotel Cronsky, she slips, knocks over a chair, regains her balance, resumes running, away from New York, her boyfriend, her boss, her mother, to catch the train. That split-second incident, the slipping, the knocking over of a chair, is what turns this game into an unforgettable experience. This is no longer a game, it is life.

There are some very funny scenes too, some of them, alas, inside jokes which most players will miss. Kate's clockwork train runs out of spring power in Barrockstadt, a university town and a perfect spoof of Oxford and Cambridge. She has to take her train to a winding station. To do that, she needs to get it towed by a barge. Kate hasn't got the money (another piece of absurdity: who would go on such an errand without $100 in her pocket?). So she tries to talk the barge owner into doing it for free, as a favour. The barge owner replies: "Favor, favor, alors buik not full, mooonney, ya, buik full." Unless you know French and Flemish you won't appreciate it: "Favour, favour, then belly not full. Money, yes, belly full". Then Kate tries idle chit-chat. There is a marvellous aviary in the railway station. Has he been to see all those birds? Comes the answer: "Met U, mooie girl, ya, ya, met plezier!" (with you, beautiful girl, yes, yes, with pleasure!) Kate does not understand of course, so the barge owner's wife translates: "We no leave boat, husband is land sick."

The Bad
The puzzles. They bring nothing to the story, but aggravation. Some are trivial, some absurd, some aggravating. Aggravating such as when one puzzle requires you to have listened to Kate's mother's over-the-phone logorrhea to solve the Russian diva's puzzle. It was all useless garbage, along with her boyfriend's calls, and her boss's calls, and you are expected to have written down all that crap? (it doesn't show on your journal). Or again, you are supposed to mix a cocktail that will make the Russian diva regain her voice. Following the instructions, you mix the cocktail. She drinks it. No effect. So? So you think you have stuffed up, and you try again, different ways. Wrong. What you must do is mix it again, exactly the same way, and it will work. I object to that. There are many more such examples of aggravating absurdities, such as when you are told that a document must be signed, when, in fact, you should have it stamped.

The Bottom Line
What other game could be worth playing, with such stupid, irrelevant puzzles, with such a linear story? And yet, what other games end up with such flying colours against such a handicap? "Syberia" just has to be something exceptional.

Ah, if only, if only....

The Good
The graphics are beautiful. I wish there was a way I could just sit back and watch a slide show of all the scenes in the game. They are some of the best I've ever seen, and the ambient sounds that went with it were just amazing. Almost immediately I was immersed in the atmosphere of this game.

Character models look great. A real improvement over past recent adventure games.

The cutscenes are also very beautiful. You even get to go back and watch them again on the main menu, which is something I did a few times.

The Bad
Allright, the story isn't that bad, and the cutscenes and in-game graphics are beautiful, but like many other recent adventure games, this game's biggest flaw is the completely unlikely method of completing puzzles and getting anywhere in the game. The story is something like, you find out that this company that you're trying to buy (or rather, a company you represent is buying this company) belongs to an heir that everyone thinks is dead (and the reason why is so mind-baffling stupid), so you must go find him and convince him to let you buy the company.

Well, that sounds like a nice adventure detective-type game. Now, if you were a lawyer trying to track down this heir, what would you do? Would you break into churches and rummage through peoples' dressers and dig up caskets and steal a train? Well that's pretty much this lawyer's method of "puzzle-solving".

That was by far the most annoying aspect of the game. And since there's no way around it (for God's sake, she's carrying around a cell phone! USE IT, WOMAN!) that's just what you have to do. But there are other, more minor parts of the game that I found to be annoying. Like some of the voice acting. This "Mumu" kid pisses me off. Whoever voiced him (or wrote his dialogue) should be smacked.

One part of the game REQUIRES you to draw a picture of a mammoth for this Mumu kid. Now, you have paper, you have a pen, why don't you just draw it? No, apparently you've never SEEN a mammoth, so you have to go find a picture of one. Didn't see the barely-visible picture of the mammoth on the wall? Well, you can't go any farther in the game until you see it so you can sketch it. I think I spent three days just wandering around every single part of the town looking for a way to go on with the game. I finally resorted to using a walkthru and discovered that there was this picture of a mammoth on the wall of an attic...I didn't see it when I was up there.

Now, some people might have seen it. I could have just been blind. But my point is, a lot of the puzzles in the game require you to have eagle eyes, to be able to scrutinize every single inch of the game for anything that you might have to use later. I play adventure games because, to me, they're like an "interactive movie". But I don't remember seeing any movies where the main character spends the entire show on his hands and knees on the dirt road searching for any sort of pebble that might be out of place.

The Bottom Line
I'd say, pick it up just for the incredible graphics. But for God's sake, can't they make an adventure game that requires you to do realistic things and complete puzzles that don't involve such mind-numbling scrutiny?