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I've been going through a few adventure games lately, and Syberia has been an interesting outlier, in that it almost feels like it doesn't want to be an adventure game. Not that every point-and-click adventure needs puzzles, but whenever you run into one in Syberia, it almost feels like it's just out of some contractual obligation to the genre it found itself in.
I mean this in the best way possible, but it feels like a game that would've been a "walking simulator," or a Telltale style episodic adventure, if it was only made ten years later or so.
The premise is simple. You're Kate Walker, a lawyer from New York who just arrived in a tiny French city. Your goal is to close out a sale of the automaton factory on the behalf of a giant toy corporation. However, a sudden tragedy flips it upside down and sends you on a journey to find the person who inherited said factory.
Once the opening is over and done with, you'll notice that there is little to no handholding in Syberia. At best, there are gentle nudges that ensure that you're not entirely lost and unaware of what to do (at least as long as you pay attention to the dialogue, there is no real journal here).
While there is no exploration in the traditional sense, you're usually left free to roam around this beautiful world and figure things out for yourself. This can be a bit of a detriment at times, as despite this freedom, Syberia is an extremely linear game. Approaching things out of the strict sequences that the game had in mind usually leads to either of two outcomes:
1. You solve the "puzzle" before you're even meant to know what the puzzle is.
2. You make the "puzzle" harder by approaching it without the crucial narrative context, which either allows for a new interaction or makes sense of what you're looking at.
You will also create an extra bit of backtracking for yourself, but that's not really a great concern. Syberia is still a fairly small game, and once you probe out the limits of the area, it only becomes easier to put things together later on.
As mentioned before, this game in general doesn't concern itself with traditional point-and-click gameplay. Most of the time, you progress simply by talking to people, going to new places, reading new notes, and picking up the precious few items that exist in this game.
The real point here is your, or rather Kate's journey. It's not exactly rare for adventure games, but I love that Kate comes off as her own person, rather than a player surrogate. Even if many of your feelings and impressions are likely to overlap throughout the adventure.
It's like a melancholic ride through the places that the world at large has forgotten. A little French town that used to be renowned for making automatons (make sure you don't call them robots), a grand university hidden in the middle of nowhere, an abandoned soviet industrial complex where the only two people, and a deserted resort with a hotel and occupants that are both past their glory days.
However, forgotten doesn't mean worthless. You meet so many odd characters, and each one is willing to share their story, feelings, knowledge, and opinions, well past the usual scope of simply delivering plot or progression relevant info.
At the start of the story, you run by a lonely old man sitting on a bench, a citizen of Valadilene. He's very eager to tell you the stories about the town and its people, but he will never get to tell them, and Kate will never hear them, business comes first.
Roughly in the middle you run into an elderly couple who runs a barge. The husband is seasoned sailor who speaks in an incomprehensible mix of different languages, so his seemingly Eastern European wife has to translate everything he says, a role she seems to be fairly used to. They're nice people, but also poor, so you'll need to gather up a bit of cash before getting their help.
Then, near the end, there is a receptionist of the aforementioned hotel. These days, it seems like all he does is sit and watch football on his beat up TV that barely gets signal. Despite the place being in such a sorry state, you can clearly feel that he's clinging to the past to some extent, and maintains an appearance of running an elite establishment for only the finest guests.
These are all fairly minor characters that you will not be interacting all that much with, but I think what Sokal excelled at, is planting little seeds of humanity across even the most minor characters. It achieves an effect similar to character archetypes, but instead of broad strokes, it's small things that many people would find relatable, either through their own lived experiences, or those of people around them. Which in part makes these characters feel more human, more alive, more sincere, in a way that a simple archetype could never be.
And making sure that these characters feel like real people is crucial for Kate's journey, because along the way she will keep getting calls, and unless it's her mom, it's going to be a bad time. Your lovely conversations with quirky oddballs and earnest weirdos will be interrupted by a call from an obnoxious boss who blames you for things out of your control, and a fiance who is more concerned with his evening plans then what the love of his life is going through.
This mounting contrast between the bits of Kate's past life and the adventure she finds herself in, eventually recontextualizes this "unfortunate detour" into what it actually is. An escape from awful people, and escape from contracts, documents, formalities, false appearances, and social obligations.
When Kate finally completes her mission, when she locates that factory heir that you learn so much about along the way, it's so profoundly anticlimactic, yet it also serves as a confrontation between two vastly different ways of living, thinking, and feeling. A confrontation that Kate can't leave without choosing what truly matters to her.
Even if Syberia has a few flaws that keep it from being a stellar adventure game, it's such a wonderful narrative that I really hope that more people play this. Especially if you share my love for these idealistic and sentimental stories.
Microids have announced that they have a remaster (it's actually a remake) on the way, made by the French Virtuallyz Gaming studio. By all accounts, it seems like they put some effort into it, and it will have some modern niceties, like highlighted interactables. I doubt your experience will be too bad if you choose to play that one, but I mostly just want to say that it's very much worth playing the original instead/anyway.
This is an incredibly good looking game, almost unbelievably so for how few people worked on it, and it works on modern systems just fine. It's even deck compatible, which is what I played it on. Fair warning though, the deck's screen is fairly small, and makes it hard to read some text without utilizing the handheld's zoom feature. Syberia also believes in a fairly naturalistic way of displaying objects, which makes certain items hard to spot, so watch out for that.
Lastly, while I love Kate's voice in the English dub, and most VAs did a good job in general, you get this feeling that maybe the English cast wasn't all that well directed, or maybe had limited cooperation with the original developers. Sometimes it leads to questionable delivery that almost sounds like they had to guess how the line is supposed to sound. Other times there's an obvious disconnect between the subtitles and voiceover.
This is not exactly game ruining, but I would've definitely switched to French if I could. You'll have to mess with the files a bit, but it's worth it if you want more authentic delivery, and the characters still sound wonderful, especially Kate, once again.