izigame.me

Release Date: March 18th 2022
Developers: Benoit Sokal team at Microids Studio Paris
Genre&Topics: story-driven cinematic adventure, mechanical puzzles, long cut scenes, nazism, fascism, resistance, World War II in fictional world reminding real history, love story, very good story and storytelling.
This is a spoiler free review. I’m just discussing the quality of storytelling, not the story itself. You can read my review even before to play the game.
INTRO
I played both the first two episodes of Syberia in 2004, but the first was released in 2002; they are like two parts of the same single game. Classic point & click graphic adventures alternating puzzles, exploration and narrative cut scenes. They added no novelties or innovations to the genre. Story is good and meaningful but weird, just like many other games belonging to the same genre. Summing up, Kate Walker seems destined to be a rampant american lawyer in a society dominated by speculation, selfishness, materialism, pursuit of selfish profit. A society that has stopped to dream, to chase adventures, passions, humaneness, creativeness, ideals and values. Kate is sent by her law firm to the fictional French village of Valadilène to oversee the corporate takeover of a family-owned “automata” factory. Automata are really evolved, some of them can even reason and speak as humans, but they apparently have no feelings and emotions. After meeting Hans Voralberg (the inventor) and the automaton Oscar, Kate understands that passions, dreams, adventure, humaneness, ideals and values are what matters more in life. She decides to escape her past life (even her mom and her boyfriend) and quit her career as lawyer. They embark on a long journey to the island of Syberia in search of Mammoths; the Mammoth is the metaphor for a dream or a passion that is perhaps unattainable and apparently crazy but makes life meaningful. As you see Syberia is a game for dreamers and idealists, for those who love to travel to escape (in vain) from themselves and reality; it comes with very elegiac, romantic and poetic mood. You can see it as a hymn to escapism through video games or fantasy novels or comics or more in general through art. Not by chance the creator of the Syberia series, Benoit Sokal, was a renowned French comic-books writer (see the pessimistic noir series Inspector Canardo) who put his art at the service of video games. He died in 2021. Syberia III was his last video game; it was released in 2017, but it was not well received by critics and fans. I never played it, sorry!
However lately I was curious about the fourth episode. A lot of critics and fans were incensing it! Well, now I can say that Syberia: The Wolrd Before is a truly passionate and felt tribute to the art of Benoit Sokal by the core team of the first two episodes. And I can say they surpassed the Master and developed the best entry in the series: a narrative masterpiece, one of the best stories ever told in video games, one of the most compelling narrative games I ever played in four decades! Lately at Microids they are developing really good narrative games, see Vertigo! Kudos!
FROM SYBERIA I & II TO THE WORLD BEFORE
TWB is the same as the first two episodes? Not properly! It’s point & click no more. You can freely explore pre-rendered scenarios, no camera control, just auto-scrolling camera following your movements; graphics is very good and detailed, with pleasant Art Nouveau aesthetics, a real joy for the eyes, especially in 4K. The design of the fictional world is at-the-state-of-the-art, very credible and absolutely immersive. Even characters are well designed; maybe animations and expressions are a bit stiff, not the best, but still very good. Overall, you have the feeling to play an AAA game or at least AA1/2!! From a technical point of view the leap is huge in comparison to the first two episodes.
In old episodes, puzzles were quite hard, sometimes intrusive, annoying, nonsense, too much detached from narrative, as in other old school graphic adventures. TWB comes apparently with the same kind of puzzles. Most of times you have to put Voralberg’s automata or machinery in operation. However they are less hard, I would say easy, less annoying, less intrusive; they are more integrated in narration or at least don’t interrupt the narrative flow that much. TWB introduces multiple choice dialogues; they make storytelling more interactive but have quite no consequences on the main story. That’s good, it would be bad to change the very good story! As you see, story and gameplay are quite detached, as in old school games. Story is told through cut scenes, some dialogues, few documents and your diary; we cannot speak of integration of narrative in gameplay, as in many contemporary interactive drama by Quantic Dreams, Telltales, Dontnod or in so wrongly called walking simulators (Firewatch, Vertigo, Edith Finch, etc). However there is no heavy ludo-narrative conflict in TWB. In early Syberia episodes ludo-narrative dissonance was high, not here. It gives you the illusion to have a role in the story, even if interactivity is limited to exploration, puzzles, some multiple choice dialogues, collecting some documents. Cut scenes have the main narrative role.
Is still TWB a work of poetic naive escapism? Kate Walker is the same Kate Walker as ever?
(continue here: https://vgartsite.wordpress.com/2022/05/26/syberia-the-world-before/)