I don't know why, but I'm quite excited to play this one. Maybe because it's the first relatively modern and big-budget adventure game on this list that I haven't played. It's also quite well thought-of iirc, but that doesn't seem to mean much with adventure games!
Have got through the first few steps. So far, it's kind of cool but it lacks finesse. It's kind of like a more polished GK3 - it looks a hundred times nicer, and the UI's much better, but you start the game in a hotel and then just wander around having mundane conversations in a naturalistic aesthetic. These are dangerously bland choices for an adventure game - the player is going to be spending most of their time walking slowly around and talking to people while gazing at the same environments for extended periods, so 'have them take business calls and pass paperwork back and forth for the first ten minutes' and 'make it look as realistic as current technology will allow' is not really the smartest approach. The translation is also quite shoddy and the voice acting isn't exactly bad but it feels very stagey and disconnected (though perhaps the writing is mainly to blame here!). Also, there's a very weird choice to start the looping music track with a dramatic timpani strike so every few minutes it seems like something exciting is about to happen even though you're just walking down the same old street for the 20th time.
To be fair, though, the art is all nicely presented and they've at least got some weird architecture and rusty automatons all over the place to liven it up. I know what my goal is, I'm intrigued by the overall story, and the puzzles so far have been fair if mostly dull. The automaton ones have been cool, though - realising I had to place a letter in the doorbot's hand so it would scan it and let me in was very satisfying.
I'm stuck now because I have the key to the factory but I can't find the actual entrance. Considering half my playtime so far has been looking for the notary's house, forced to try numerous fake doors until I finally discovered the correct one because the hotel guy refused to give me any more direction than "you'll know it when you see it" (I didn't), having essentially the same problem again straight away does not bode well.
Goddammit, it's a tiny hotspot in a long concrete wall that's trailing into the distance off on the side of one screen, like I'm in Labyrinth or something.
Hard to spot exit spots are a plague of the genre, but this one was particularly egregious.
Gahh, I was worried that the automaton puzzles were perilously close to Myst type stuff and now that's exactly what they are. I'm in an automaton factory and I've got to make some legs, but it's basically just walking around arbitrarily pushing weird switches and hoping they do something useful. I've managed to get some power to meter 6, but none of the others. Do I need to go wander round the grounds and find other factory buildings to push stuff in, or is there just some specific order that I need to do things in here? If the former, that's not particularly satisfying but also a lot less frustrating than the latter, so here's hoping.
This game is on the verge of losing any goodwill, hopefully it'll pull itself back from the brink soon. Really though, the opening section of an adventure game should be where it's at its most fun - easy satisfying puzzles and fast-moving story to pull the player in before it settles down into the bigger hubs of more complex puzzle structure. If I'm getting bored or irritated in the opening chapter, that's a bad sign.
Well, it didn't go full Myst, it was more like Samorost - just randomly clicking on shit until something happens, which I don't consider engaging puzzle design. It's especially irritating when there's so much empty space to run back and forth through - the ratio of screens with some use to screens purely there for you to walk through on the way to somewhere else is probably 3:7. Even single rooms get split up into three or four screens that you have to click your way through until you land on the correct camera angle to interact with a desk drawer or whatever.
There's very little thought required here at all, even with the more classic adventure puzzles. The only things I got stuck on were pixel-hunts, which are exacerbated here by the trendy little cursor, which only changes a tiny bit when it hovers over something interactive, so even when you're sweeping over the entire screen for hotspots it's very easy to miss them.
Anyway, I finished the scavenger hunt for four "important things" (that's genuinely all the information you get, so you just have to keep pulling at levers until something shows up that seems backstory-related enough to count) so I'm onto the next chapter now and am done for the day. Unless the game picks up massively at this point, I doubt I'll play it for much longer when I come back to it. I'm starting to wonder if Grim Fandango is the only good 3D adventure ever made..!
I decided to hate-read some reviews and realised that I've been amalgamating this with Longest Journey in my head. Sadly, I don't own that game. But anyway, here's a quote from the Adventure Gamers review of Syberia: "the story is so elegantly and subtly told that you feel as though you are reading poetry or being sung a sonnet that has been transformed into a game". The storytelling in this game is abysmal! It regularly stops everything for Kate to get a phonecall from someone in her everyday life and either get shouted at (if it's a man) or waffled at (if it's a woman), none of which have any bearing on the story or are well written enough to help with character building. There are a handful of background characters to talk to who don't affect the story or puzzles and presumably are there to add flavour but are less convincing as human beings than the robot. You spend a long time reading through old diaries, having backstory arduously spelled out to you, and then a big moment at the end of the chapter is getting a flashback cutscene which doesn't show you a single thing you didn't already know!
I know I shouldn't be surprised that adventure-devoted sites is giving these bad games glowing reviews, but they're giving them equal or better scores than the best Lucasarts adventures, and AG rated this as the 15th best adventure game of all time! And some mainstream sites gave it strong reviews as well - even the worst of them was IGN saying "Syberia had the makings of a great game. Spectacular graphics, somewhat decent voice acting, a nice musical score and sound effects and a plot that might have been interesting are all present in the game. It falls far short of being a great game because of its much too simplistic puzzles, boring story, characters you don't fall in love with and a really bad ending. Syberia is a must-buy for anyone who loves eye candy and doesn't care about an immersive story, but for hard-core adventure gamers seeking the latest in puzzling thrills, this is a pass." and yet still giving it 71%!
This is all to say that adventure games got far too easy a ride back in 2002!
Well, it kept crashing in the new area for some reason, so the decision was taken out of my hands. I skimmed through a playthrough vid instead. Turns out the entire story is that you track down the missing inventor and he's obsessed with finding the missing island of Syberia (terrible choice to name their fictional island one letter out from an existing country) where mammoths might still exist. So you decide to get on his train with him instead of going home to your cheating fiancé (you find out over the course of a bunch more of those phone calls that he's cheating, another terrible decision to have this big sub-plot going on purely via a bunch of stilted 30 second calls). And that's it! The End! No Syberia, no mammoths, nothing. And then the second game picks up there and is just more of the same. It's as if they were doing an episodic release, except the games came out two years apart.
Rating: Very bad
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