about a mythical island and a brave adventuress
//Despite my best efforts, this rant still contains spoilers to the whole Syberia series. The mere fact that there’re three games in the series with the same protagonist is a spoiler in itself. In my defence, MY spoilers are certainly less brutal than the spoilers Microids put in the release trailer to the third game, which I’d wholeheartedly recommend avoiding if you decide playing it. But they still are spoilers, so beware.
Skipping ahead, must say that I can’t in good heart recommend it to anyone. And yet, I love it. Here’s why.
The first part was released in 2002, so long ago, if you think of it, that all the photos from that time probably have a sepia filter magically applied. It had one prominent feature that ran with a hatchet at you from the start: it was maddeningly beautiful, in that soul-stealing don’t-want-to-see-anything-else-but-this way. And you gotta hand it to this series, exploring cozy themes is what it DOES. Want to see a dusty attic in a manor in a forgotten village in Swiss Alps? An old garden with a hedge maze and a broken statue? A train station-aviary hybrid at a formerly great university where almost nobody studies anymore? How about an old resort by the sea where an old opera singer lives her last days, enveloped in memories? What if it all tied with you travelling from place to place on a strange wind-up train that a sister built to find her long lost brother, before dying of old age, giving us the opportunity to complete her last journey instead?
You just wish all these themes were explored properly. This game feels more like a sketch than a finished picture. You come, you see, you conquer some silly puzzle and move on. Beautiful scenery - still beautiful, if you run the game in a windowed mode in an 800x600 resolution - can’t save the world alone. You need characters for that, and dialogues, and actual content. And well, this game has it all, sure. But playing it feels like trying to cut criminals with a dull sword, and just scratching them instead.
The thing is, to enjoy this game, you have to close your eyes on a lot of things. The characters never feel deep enough to be real. The stories are there, but they are rather offhandedly mentioned, than properly explored. And the game just casually ignores a lot of questions that inevitably rise if you try to judge it by the logic of reality. Like, why is the access to the train station of a small but formerly bustling village locked off behind the local factory walls? Did the sister build the giant station herself along with the train? How? How come a genius brain-damaged inventor built so many things that clearly required construction and metalworking and who knows what on such a massive scale? Why all the railroad stations have winding mechanisms for our train? Sure, the inventor built them too. But how come they’re still there if no one’s ever used them for DECADES? Or, if he built them recently, why didn’t he just go ahead and continued the journey without a train? How come everyone across Europe and Russia speaks English? Why does the railroad have just one track for so many miles? How does the protagonist’s phone get reception in places like an ABANDONED mining town? Good luck answering those and more, many more of them. But if you just close your eyes and pretend it doesn’t matter, THEN you can derive pleasure from this game.
The funny thing is, it was one of my first games, back in my childhood when I didn’t completely understand how reality worked. And it sort of contributed to creating this mental picture where every human interaction has meaning and probably is a part of a puzzle. Abandoning it was rather disappointing, but coming back with a different world view didn’t completely ruin the game too. Sure, the writing now feels far from stellar, sure, if you start thinking about things, you’ll most likely get disappointed, but it’s rather like Jonathan Creek - if you think hard enough, you’ll probably figure out the episode’s mystery. But to maximise the pleasure you don’t even try, to be surprised in the end.
But if you do close your eyes, the game will dip you into this cozy melancholy and make you feel things. A lot like a childhood you never had you can read about in Stephen King’s novels, or, I don’t know, play in Life is Strange, the half-defined stories of old glorious places that now sit abandoned pluck some strings inside your heart you hardly even knew were there. And there’s the adventure, the story of a New York lawyer who couldn’t communicate with her boss properly, so she set off on an epic journey, searching for an heir to an old factory to tie up a business deal, and discovered that overcoming hardships is what she was made for. These things combined produce a really magical effect, magical enough to make you cry watching the credits slowly crawling into nothingness under your screen. Something that games like The Longest Journey could never do, despite being entertaining and interesting to play. And that’s why I love it.
Which brings us to the second part of the adventure. There we were, two years later, still bathing in blissful sepia, with Syberia II on our hands. And a direct continuation of the story too! Which I won’t spoil here (other people could be reading this! :audiencelaughter:), but will just say that there’s almost nothing to say about it. It concentrates on the adventure part of the concept, and waves goodbye to the melancholic exploration part. It’s solid. It hardly makes you cry in the end, but it has its sad moments, and its unexpected twists, and its moments of elation, and its moments of maddening frustration. I remember using a walkthrough a lot on my first playthrough. And I had to use the walkthrough four times for my replay. And I don’t regret it either. Some puzzles rely heavily on pixel hunting, some puzzles rely on you figuring out their internal logic, which is not always straightforward. The thing is, I’m pretty sure this game didn’t really need all those puzzles. The first one almost didn’t have them, and just look at it go.
All in all, Syberia II is a less memorable game than Syberia, and a bit more enjoyable - possibly because it feels more confident, possibly because you’ve already got acquainted with its formula and know what to expect and how to play better. Except for one thing: the protagonist is... strange. I played with Russian voiceovers the first time around, and it was alright, but only because I got used to the voice of the protagonist and didn’t exactly have a choice - that voice sounds beyond atrocious now. The English voice of Kate Walker is ok, for the most part, but sometimes the things she says are so... annoying, more often in tone, rarely in substance. The second wouldn’t be at all bad, if the voice and the delivery were pleasant. But they not always are.
And this game doesn’t need much for a protagonist! Just someone curious, open-minded, good-natured and smart. It’s not hard to write one like this. You don’t have to bother with quirks and layers - you only have one thing to worry about, and for the most part, the writers nailed it. But her reactions sometimes still feel a bit off, and not in a sympathetic way.
And this is why I kicked my rule to consume media only in English from a skyscraper for the third part of the adventure - because strangely enough, Russian Kate Walker in Syberia 3 sounds actually pleasant.
And yes, here we are, thirteen years later, staring into the sequel nobody asked for while it stares back with its bloodshot eyes.
And what a sequel! With a budget of 8 million dollars, if a stray interview to be believed. Is it a lot? Quite, for a small group of developers. The Witcher 3 cost 81 million, but there’s MUCH more content and MUCH more marketing (36 million dollars worth of it, in fact). And we’re staring into an adventure game with straightforward linear gameplay that was barely advertised at all.
So what did they spend their money on? Surely not on a recap video. You just get plunged into the fate of Kate Walker as she continues her journey. No notes, no quick dialogue as an equivalent to ‘previously on Syberia’. Saw that number 3 in the title? This is one of those hardcore sequels, playing it without playing the previous two games is hardly worth it. And it raises the first question ‘why?’, the notorious question you ask yourself A LOT playing Syberia 3. Because the previous story arc is finished, and all you needed was to introduce certain characters, and you’d be good to go selling this game to every unsuspecting mark who didn’t even know the previous games existed.
The important question is, is this game any good? And the answer is, well, ehh, um, I dunno? And remember, we’re in the special mood to forgive this game any logical inconsistencies - we’ve just beaten the first two after all. We’ll also be forgiving it its numerous technical difficulties, that, hopefully, will be fixed in the upcoming patches - but it needs to be said that Lovecraft knew NOTHING. Kate Walker in the walls is much scarier than rats in the walls, believe me. There’re also controls that are sometimes so bad to you, you’d think you killed their entire family at some point, and voiceovers with intonations all over the place, as if wobbling like that is now in fashion. So yeah, immersion? What’s immersion?
Having said this, Syberia 3 has some nice music, good character models and dope environments. Most of the locations could be made better, but there’s at least one evocative place, and most of the rest honestly are not really bad. And this is where all the good stuff ends.
So welcome to the gray stuff. Like game design. You play this and you ask yourself. why?. Why do I need those specific papers to start a fire if I have a lot of junk in my inventory, and I’ve just picked up a SACK WITH SAWDUST. Why do I need to run around a pretty big space during a time-sensitive episode (according to the story, in the game you can take as long as you want) to seek out specific things that could have been substituted for something more logical? Why is a person I need to help is conscious and able to talk, but unable to tell me where to find their meds?
Although, it’s gray for a reason. Playing this game is pleasant, despite everything. Most puzzles, despite being both easy AND easily bruteforceable, are quirky and nice.
But that’s not all. The writing is sometimes bad. There’re situations where a clear explanation would definitely win people over, and Kate mumbles something weird and only tangentially relevant instead. It gets better closer to the end, but there hardly was invented a better way to induce frustration. Though they managed to not put you off Kate’s character completely, like they did in the previous games - and I blame the Russian voiceovers for that. And also, there're decent and fitting comedic episodes for the first time in the series. That counts for a lot.
And the story is also gray! While a part of it concerns a romantic quest, which is actually nice, this game also has villains. Even though I dislike the concept of outright villains in media, I was prepared to forgive Syberia 3 even that. But their motivation NEVER GETS REVEALED! Just think of it, they pursue a strange vendetta against this small tribe of northerners nobody really cares about, they waste resources like time and helicopter fuel, and the best thing approaching their motivation is a remark of one of the characters that they do it ‘just for kicks’. I mean, sure, maybe that character knew nothing, Jon Snow, maybe their true motives were saved for a sequel. But we’ll never see it. The greedy and stupid publisher Microids wanted to sell at least a million copies in 2017, and so far they just sold around 30 thousands. So I don’t really see how there could be another installment of Kate Walker’s adventures, unless Benoit Sokal just embezzled half the budget to make a game with it later.
And it’s a shame, too. Because the ending is weird. It’s not an outright cliffhanger, but it’s not the ending you’d wish upon your friend. Your sworn enemy who designed Syberia 3’s controls - maybe, but not upon someone you like or respect. Remember what you felt reaching the end of Mostly Harmless? Syberia 3 is not too far behind.
So the sequel WOULD be welcome. Honestly, it would be. This is a strange game, but it’s a high budget adventure game that tries to be serious. There’re not a lot of these. But as things stand, it’s a rather nonsensical story in terms of impact. Maybe it carries a message, sure. If so, I dislike it. But even if there’s one, the delivery cuts it with a chainsaw and lugs it towards the nearest sawmill.
It’s a bit sad that this series would end like that. With two sequels we hardly even needed, let alone deserved. With such a direction of the story, you wish it’d found a better compass at some point. With a mixture of joy and frustration where frustration threatens to win. I still love it, sure. But now you see why I can't really recommend it, right?
Skipping ahead, must say that I can’t in good heart recommend it to anyone. And yet, I love it. Here’s why.
The first part was released in 2002, so long ago, if you think of it, that all the photos from that time probably have a sepia filter magically applied. It had one prominent feature that ran with a hatchet at you from the start: it was maddeningly beautiful, in that soul-stealing don’t-want-to-see-anything-else-but-this way. And you gotta hand it to this series, exploring cozy themes is what it DOES. Want to see a dusty attic in a manor in a forgotten village in Swiss Alps? An old garden with a hedge maze and a broken statue? A train station-aviary hybrid at a formerly great university where almost nobody studies anymore? How about an old resort by the sea where an old opera singer lives her last days, enveloped in memories? What if it all tied with you travelling from place to place on a strange wind-up train that a sister built to find her long lost brother, before dying of old age, giving us the opportunity to complete her last journey instead?
You just wish all these themes were explored properly. This game feels more like a sketch than a finished picture. You come, you see, you conquer some silly puzzle and move on. Beautiful scenery - still beautiful, if you run the game in a windowed mode in an 800x600 resolution - can’t save the world alone. You need characters for that, and dialogues, and actual content. And well, this game has it all, sure. But playing it feels like trying to cut criminals with a dull sword, and just scratching them instead.
The thing is, to enjoy this game, you have to close your eyes on a lot of things. The characters never feel deep enough to be real. The stories are there, but they are rather offhandedly mentioned, than properly explored. And the game just casually ignores a lot of questions that inevitably rise if you try to judge it by the logic of reality. Like, why is the access to the train station of a small but formerly bustling village locked off behind the local factory walls? Did the sister build the giant station herself along with the train? How? How come a genius brain-damaged inventor built so many things that clearly required construction and metalworking and who knows what on such a massive scale? Why all the railroad stations have winding mechanisms for our train? Sure, the inventor built them too. But how come they’re still there if no one’s ever used them for DECADES? Or, if he built them recently, why didn’t he just go ahead and continued the journey without a train? How come everyone across Europe and Russia speaks English? Why does the railroad have just one track for so many miles? How does the protagonist’s phone get reception in places like an ABANDONED mining town? Good luck answering those and more, many more of them. But if you just close your eyes and pretend it doesn’t matter, THEN you can derive pleasure from this game.
The funny thing is, it was one of my first games, back in my childhood when I didn’t completely understand how reality worked. And it sort of contributed to creating this mental picture where every human interaction has meaning and probably is a part of a puzzle. Abandoning it was rather disappointing, but coming back with a different world view didn’t completely ruin the game too. Sure, the writing now feels far from stellar, sure, if you start thinking about things, you’ll most likely get disappointed, but it’s rather like Jonathan Creek - if you think hard enough, you’ll probably figure out the episode’s mystery. But to maximise the pleasure you don’t even try, to be surprised in the end.
But if you do close your eyes, the game will dip you into this cozy melancholy and make you feel things. A lot like a childhood you never had you can read about in Stephen King’s novels, or, I don’t know, play in Life is Strange, the half-defined stories of old glorious places that now sit abandoned pluck some strings inside your heart you hardly even knew were there. And there’s the adventure, the story of a New York lawyer who couldn’t communicate with her boss properly, so she set off on an epic journey, searching for an heir to an old factory to tie up a business deal, and discovered that overcoming hardships is what she was made for. These things combined produce a really magical effect, magical enough to make you cry watching the credits slowly crawling into nothingness under your screen. Something that games like The Longest Journey could never do, despite being entertaining and interesting to play. And that’s why I love it.
Which brings us to the second part of the adventure. There we were, two years later, still bathing in blissful sepia, with Syberia II on our hands. And a direct continuation of the story too! Which I won’t spoil here (other people could be reading this! :audiencelaughter:), but will just say that there’s almost nothing to say about it. It concentrates on the adventure part of the concept, and waves goodbye to the melancholic exploration part. It’s solid. It hardly makes you cry in the end, but it has its sad moments, and its unexpected twists, and its moments of elation, and its moments of maddening frustration. I remember using a walkthrough a lot on my first playthrough. And I had to use the walkthrough four times for my replay. And I don’t regret it either. Some puzzles rely heavily on pixel hunting, some puzzles rely on you figuring out their internal logic, which is not always straightforward. The thing is, I’m pretty sure this game didn’t really need all those puzzles. The first one almost didn’t have them, and just look at it go.
All in all, Syberia II is a less memorable game than Syberia, and a bit more enjoyable - possibly because it feels more confident, possibly because you’ve already got acquainted with its formula and know what to expect and how to play better. Except for one thing: the protagonist is... strange. I played with Russian voiceovers the first time around, and it was alright, but only because I got used to the voice of the protagonist and didn’t exactly have a choice - that voice sounds beyond atrocious now. The English voice of Kate Walker is ok, for the most part, but sometimes the things she says are so... annoying, more often in tone, rarely in substance. The second wouldn’t be at all bad, if the voice and the delivery were pleasant. But they not always are.
And this game doesn’t need much for a protagonist! Just someone curious, open-minded, good-natured and smart. It’s not hard to write one like this. You don’t have to bother with quirks and layers - you only have one thing to worry about, and for the most part, the writers nailed it. But her reactions sometimes still feel a bit off, and not in a sympathetic way.
And this is why I kicked my rule to consume media only in English from a skyscraper for the third part of the adventure - because strangely enough, Russian Kate Walker in Syberia 3 sounds actually pleasant.
And yes, here we are, thirteen years later, staring into the sequel nobody asked for while it stares back with its bloodshot eyes.
And what a sequel! With a budget of 8 million dollars, if a stray interview to be believed. Is it a lot? Quite, for a small group of developers. The Witcher 3 cost 81 million, but there’s MUCH more content and MUCH more marketing (36 million dollars worth of it, in fact). And we’re staring into an adventure game with straightforward linear gameplay that was barely advertised at all.
So what did they spend their money on? Surely not on a recap video. You just get plunged into the fate of Kate Walker as she continues her journey. No notes, no quick dialogue as an equivalent to ‘previously on Syberia’. Saw that number 3 in the title? This is one of those hardcore sequels, playing it without playing the previous two games is hardly worth it. And it raises the first question ‘why?’, the notorious question you ask yourself A LOT playing Syberia 3. Because the previous story arc is finished, and all you needed was to introduce certain characters, and you’d be good to go selling this game to every unsuspecting mark who didn’t even know the previous games existed.
The important question is, is this game any good? And the answer is, well, ehh, um, I dunno? And remember, we’re in the special mood to forgive this game any logical inconsistencies - we’ve just beaten the first two after all. We’ll also be forgiving it its numerous technical difficulties, that, hopefully, will be fixed in the upcoming patches - but it needs to be said that Lovecraft knew NOTHING. Kate Walker in the walls is much scarier than rats in the walls, believe me. There’re also controls that are sometimes so bad to you, you’d think you killed their entire family at some point, and voiceovers with intonations all over the place, as if wobbling like that is now in fashion. So yeah, immersion? What’s immersion?
Having said this, Syberia 3 has some nice music, good character models and dope environments. Most of the locations could be made better, but there’s at least one evocative place, and most of the rest honestly are not really bad. And this is where all the good stuff ends.
So welcome to the gray stuff. Like game design. You play this and you ask yourself. why?. Why do I need those specific papers to start a fire if I have a lot of junk in my inventory, and I’ve just picked up a SACK WITH SAWDUST. Why do I need to run around a pretty big space during a time-sensitive episode (according to the story, in the game you can take as long as you want) to seek out specific things that could have been substituted for something more logical? Why is a person I need to help is conscious and able to talk, but unable to tell me where to find their meds?
Although, it’s gray for a reason. Playing this game is pleasant, despite everything. Most puzzles, despite being both easy AND easily bruteforceable, are quirky and nice.
But that’s not all. The writing is sometimes bad. There’re situations where a clear explanation would definitely win people over, and Kate mumbles something weird and only tangentially relevant instead. It gets better closer to the end, but there hardly was invented a better way to induce frustration. Though they managed to not put you off Kate’s character completely, like they did in the previous games - and I blame the Russian voiceovers for that. And also, there're decent and fitting comedic episodes for the first time in the series. That counts for a lot.
And the story is also gray! While a part of it concerns a romantic quest, which is actually nice, this game also has villains. Even though I dislike the concept of outright villains in media, I was prepared to forgive Syberia 3 even that. But their motivation NEVER GETS REVEALED! Just think of it, they pursue a strange vendetta against this small tribe of northerners nobody really cares about, they waste resources like time and helicopter fuel, and the best thing approaching their motivation is a remark of one of the characters that they do it ‘just for kicks’. I mean, sure, maybe that character knew nothing, Jon Snow, maybe their true motives were saved for a sequel. But we’ll never see it. The greedy and stupid publisher Microids wanted to sell at least a million copies in 2017, and so far they just sold around 30 thousands. So I don’t really see how there could be another installment of Kate Walker’s adventures, unless Benoit Sokal just embezzled half the budget to make a game with it later.
And it’s a shame, too. Because the ending is weird. It’s not an outright cliffhanger, but it’s not the ending you’d wish upon your friend. Your sworn enemy who designed Syberia 3’s controls - maybe, but not upon someone you like or respect. Remember what you felt reaching the end of Mostly Harmless? Syberia 3 is not too far behind.
So the sequel WOULD be welcome. Honestly, it would be. This is a strange game, but it’s a high budget adventure game that tries to be serious. There’re not a lot of these. But as things stand, it’s a rather nonsensical story in terms of impact. Maybe it carries a message, sure. If so, I dislike it. But even if there’s one, the delivery cuts it with a chainsaw and lugs it towards the nearest sawmill.
It’s a bit sad that this series would end like that. With two sequels we hardly even needed, let alone deserved. With such a direction of the story, you wish it’d found a better compass at some point. With a mixture of joy and frustration where frustration threatens to win. I still love it, sure. But now you see why I can't really recommend it, right?