He’s stuffy and overtly proper, and his quirky obsession with procedure leads to a few slightly humorous moments, but his likeability stems from the similarities he shares with a certain fussy robot from the Star Wars saga. Infinitely more appealing is Oscar, the automaton who acts as the train conductor. The translation isn’t awful, but the prose hardly sparkles, and the characters that are supposed to be weird and funny, like the dim-witted boy Momo or the eccentric rectors at the university, come off as annoying. Perhaps some of these issues can be attributed to the same problems that effect most European games not originally written in English – namely, the questionable writing and inconsistent voice acting. It’s easy to sympathize with her, since her frustrations are practically universal to anyone in modern society, but she’s also incredibly bland, making it hard to care about her emotional growth beyond the player’s own projections. Her dialogue lacks personality, and she never seems to react to the fascinating things she sees. Still, the writing isn’t quite as effective as it should be, and that’s because Kate is just a really boring character. It’s a well paced out arc that contrasts perfectly with the strange adventures in rusting ruins, and it ends on just the right note. As the stress of Kate’s mission grows and she gets nothing but self-obsessed whining from her best friend and boyfriend, she starts seeing more and more that the search for Hans might lead her to a personal revelation. She has no real connection with anyone besides possibly her mother, but even she’s overtly materialistic at times. Kate’s well off, as is everyone she knows, but her life is tied around fitting into roles others want her to be. Kate’s old life in America is portrayed in conversations with her boss and loved ones as a life of imprisonment through privilege. While the story is centered around finding Hans, the narrative is more interested in Kate’s character arc, shown by the growing contrast between how she reacts to these strange new worlds and her old one that keeps calling her on her cell. They’re all used in truly magnificent set-pieces, including a climax involving a whole steam and gearpunk opera. Every land also has the clear mark of Hans, as he leaves glorious clockwork machinery in every place he visits. ![]() There’s a desolate beauty to every place you visit, with my personal highlight being an old Soviet spa still in use and clearly crumbling away into the sea. Every location is either in Eastern or Western Europe, and they’re all relics of the age of the great and cold wars. With their odd personalities and hammy voice acting, they wouldn’t be out of place in a Tin Tin serial. Your train’s automaton operator, Oscar, sticks out significantly for his normal mechanical detachment contrasted with his more human moments. It does a great job of creating this exaggerated, fascinating world, as though every character in every land feels like they came out of a different story from an old pulp book. Syberia‘s setting is easily one of its strongest aspects. As the game goes on, every area Kate enters becomes stranger and more dreamlike, as she’s forced to confront her feelings on the world she has to return to. She also discovers that Hans was a genius inventor responsible for the factory’s signature goods, clock and gear automatons. ![]() Thus, Kate has to track down the illusive heir and seal the deal. The owner died, and a surprise heir was revealed in the form of her brother Hans, still alive somewhere out in Siberia. The game followed Kate Walker, an American lawyer representing a law firm assisting in a deal to buy out an old factory in a small French town called Valadilène. With a team of 35 people and a budget of two million euros (!), Syberia came out in the same year as Post Mortem, stemming to break away from the first person style Sokal used in his last game ( Amerzone) to a more traditional third person view. So what makes the series stick out to so many? What does it do that’s so rare? Still, that good will was so strong that these games have been ported all over the place, and it even earned a third game many years later. The series has been applauded for its art direction and surprisingly mature themes (by that, I mean actually mature as it explores themes of age and personal fulfillment and not shoot shoot bang titty curse word), but also flogged for simplistic mechanics. It’s become one of the most treasured and remembered works in Microïds library, though not without a lot of debate attached. ![]() Designed by comic artist Benoît Sokal and developed by Microïds, the Syberia series has become an odd little chapter in the history of point and click adventure games.
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