Syberia

Rating:
Summary: Second best adventure I've ever played
Review: I've been playing adventure games since they were text based on a mainframe computer and I really like a good one. When I get a game I like I pass it around to all my friends and family. That is what I did with this game. I have now purchased a second copy because I loanded the original out so often that somehow it never made it back to me. Since Syberia II is due out in a couple of months I wanted to replay the game. I've heard of problems running the game but I know I loaned my copy to 6 - 7 people and non of them reported any problems with the PC version. The interface seemed logical and easy to use.
For me what makes a good game is first and formost plot. It has to have a good story. No matter how good the graphics are if you don't care about the story nothing else seems to matter. As part of the plot it has to have characters I want to know more about and react appropriately to the world they are in. This game has a good plot and good characters.
Next are the puzzles. I prefer puzzles that naturally arise from the game. They did a pretty good job here. With any adventure game you have some picking up everything and trying itmes with others to see if anything happens just because what seemed logical to a programmer might not seem so logical to you or you flat out miss it. At least there aren't any combination lock puzzles where the combination was written on some wall somewhere and you have to use trial and error. Puzzles don't seem to be put in just to lengthen the game.
The one contention most people have with the game is the ending. I'll try not to explain the ending in too much detail because I don't want to spoil it for anyone. The ending does seem to end abruptly and leave you with a sense of "there should be more here" but if you think about the main character (Kate Walker) in the beginning everyone else seemed to be running her life and at the end she takes control herself. The story didn't tie up all the loose ends but you knew Kate would eventually do that.
My favorite adventure game is "Day of the Tentacle"

Rating:
Summary: Syberia? No, really, Syberia? Where are you?
Review: I love me some adventure games. You know how it goes... buy nice shiny game, get immersed, then wait with bated breath until the next title from the developers/production company comes out. Unfortunately, Syberia made me want to scream. They had such a wonderful concept working with the automatons and the art direction was gorgeous [just one example: the houses in Valadilene are beautifully stylized renditions of the art-deco (?) Metro stations in Paris, almost indescribable] and then they just let it go. Pffft. As if we'd be so immersed in the visuals that story ceases to become necessary.

My main peeves with this game were the repetitive actions of Kate and Oscar, along with the really poor conversion of dialogue to English. First: Kate walking everywhere took way too long. I could read a paragraph in the time it took Kate to jog her happy Lara Croft-esque heinie somewhere. And I had to backtrack, repeat, and generally get tangled up in Kate's inability to hustle up stairs in a timely fashion. Also: please put us back in the driver's seat, DreamCatcher... having to WATCH the main character from a third person viewpoint really objectified Kate. I wasn't losing myself in the story, I was obsessing about Kate's skintight ensemble. The attempt to give Kate a motive for the endgame sequence is facilitated in part by the many cellphone conversations, where Kate is in constant contact back home. I thought that the situation between Kate and her family/friends back home was highly contrived, annoying, and demeaning. Oscar showed the most promise as a character, but I was let down by the lack of development there.

Next: Hire me, please! I could fix the NUMEROUS, CONSTANT errors in the subtitles (which I had to use in order to figure out what people were saying... swells of music should not occur when I'm going BelTone on another character). There were spelling errors, punctuation errors, and sometimes words that weren't even there on the screen. My favorite inconsistency: "Christmas" is used as an epithet, then a few minutes later we hear a more creative and true-to-life use of a curse word (trying to be G-rated here). Too funny! I truly believe this game suffered greatly from its conversion to English. The British slang ("good, that?" "bob's your uncle") was sloshed together with incorrect American slang ("put your foot on it..." do you mean "step on the gas?") and the really strange mixture of Italian and Spanish that the boss sometimes blurted out (molti dineros?) irritated me like a brillo pad being threaded through my brain. By the end of the game I was ready for my one-way ticket on that train to the loony bin!

The story line is dropped to facilitate a hasty ending. I didn't appreciate that and won't critique it here, in case some folks don't care for spoilers. Syberia is so beautiful, you might find yourself buying it. But if you're totally happy with it and satisfied with it when you're done, then let me know. I think it's highly unlikely that I would purchase a sequel to this game, and I'll be more wary of DreamCatcher in the future. It's unfortunate, simply because the concept of the automatons is the most ingenious and original use of non-human characters I've ever seen in adventure gaming. At least now I know I could use my English degrees to help a game company be more consistent and correct in their editing and development of translations!

P.S. I was very intrigued by the woolly mammoth and SIBERIA promise made by the packaging and promotional materials. It seems I will have to hie me to the library to actually learn more about them, and might have to write a story myself in order to polish off what was started and not finished in this game.

Rating:
Summary: Moving story, beautiful game
Review: I consider myself pretty discriminate when it comes to adventure games. I cut my teeth on the Infocom text adventures; forayed into graphic adventures with Myst. With those two as my standards, it's been hard finding anything I truly enjoyed.

I LOVED Syberia. I thought character development was excellent, the puzzles were so well integrated into the story that they didn't feel like puzzles - but they weren't extremely easy either - they require some thinking. But I definitely enjoyed the lack of pixel-hunting, "use every object in your inventory to see if it's the right one" type gameplay. The graphics were superb.

OK, the voice acting left a little to be desired. But, it wasn't absolutely horrendous either. If I could, I'd take off half a star for that. But truly, the magic in this game lies in its storytelling. I was captivated, interested, and couldn't wait to find out how things turned out. The ending... All I can say without spoiling anything is: I am SO glad Syberia 2 is being released on Monday. I haven't waited for a game this eagerly since Riven!

If story is a factor to you, get this game. Both graphically and emotionally beautiful, this game is right next Myst in my Number One spot.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic!
Review: This game is phenomenal on all levels -- from graphics to video streaming cutscenes to puzzle solving. My only regret is that it ended too soon... but (not to spoil things for others interested in the game) the end is SUCH a cliffhanger! Much like the old movies of the 1950s -- you can't wait to see what happens in the next episode. It sets everything up for Syberia 2 (coming out in October).

The game plays more like a movie, the graphics and interaction are so refined, like nothing I've seen in any other game.

If you like shoot 'em up games, this game isn't for you. It is mouse-driven and puzzle solving with no killing or violence. It's a game that will please both adults and teens. You click your way through various multi-layered scenes and solve puzzles to advance to the next level. The puzzles are challenging but not so difficult that you can't figure them out, given enough time.

I'm a fan of the smartly written movie ... this is the first video game I've come across that has dialogue and plot written as well as, if not better, than some movies out there. Whoever wrote the script for it is very talented ... the discourse is natural, the actors voices in the game are perfect, you get so engrossed with the story line sometimes you forget you're playing a videogame. Some of the dialogue is funny, some serious, but overall, well written to keep your attention.

There's a cross-plot where the heroine's best friend is trying to steal away her fiancee (via various cell phone conversations), and that adds to the layers of the whole game, giving the plot more detail, and sucking you into the storyline.

I played this game all the way through in about four days. Most advanced game players will finish it in a day or so. It's not horribly challenging. But it's entertaining and engrossing and you will find yourself forgetting its simplicity because of how all parts of this game come together -- the graphics, the movie scenes, the plot, the puzzles. It's a beautiful piece of programming.

There should be more games out there like this. I know I'd buy them all. Kudos! I can't wait for Syberia 2 to be released!

Rating:
Summary: A Return to Adventure!
Review: For those of us who avoid "shooters" and other computer games of violence and twitchy action, but who have been disheartened by the apparent disappearance of the adventure genre -- rejoice! "Syberia" by Sokal is a gentle adventure game with a very clear plot line, superb graphics, and puzzles that are short and strongly logical. You'll find no "put banana on metronome" or 250-move chess puzzles in this game.

Progress through the game's scenes is by a "director-like" interface, which becomes a bit tedious when one is cycling back and forth between two distant locations, but the advantage of the interface is that motion-sickness is not a problem. I have one more comment on the graphics -- the art work is astonishing and somewhat somber, but quite spectacular. I am very pleased to have purchased the game. My personal feeling is that it is one "star" better than an earlier game by Sokal called ""Amerzone."

Rating:
Summary: A gem, almost like The Longest Journey
Review: Syberia is unique and it is hard to describe because the game is like nothing we have seen in a very long time. I am talking about The Longest Journey, yet different because the style of the graphics, the story behind the game, character development, and this gothic kind of melancholic feel is just different; just "different". As you might know already, Kate Walker is a lawyer who is pretty much like us, a person with a lot of things to worry and no time to spend with personal emotions that involves the human psychy. Playing this game as Kate Walker is like going through the emotional changes she suffers from town to town. It is like experiencing the personal growth Kate has. It is tempting to say this game is pretty much therapeutic or self-healing because apart from the beautiful rendered graphics and great sense of belonging as if though Syberia was your own homeworld, one can say that syberia is both captivating and wonderfull. I am very pleased with the outcome of this game and the hard work that Benoit Sokal has invested.

Rating:
Summary: Short gameplay and pretty easy puzzles
Review: Syberia is a puzzle-adventure where a young female lawyer figures out different mechanical puzzles to get through gorgeously detailed worlds.

What really shines in this game are the graphics. They are beautifully rendered, and each world has its own unique look. The woods and metals, water and plants are all very realistic.

On the downside, in an era where you can look at whatever you want, and the world seems "alive", this is more like walking through a beautiful, yet static painting. Every "area" has only one angle. You can't rotate at all to look behind things. If the angle they present is difficult for you to work with, too bad. You're stuck. And while in a few areas the water ripples, for the most part it is simply flat. The trees' leaves don't rustle, the clouds don't float across the sky. A few years ago this would have been fine, but in most games today you get that level of immersion. So I did miss that.

The game is all about puzzle solving. A young female lawyer intrigued me as the heroine of the story. This should mean she's smart! Plus she's not "overbuilt" as (ahem) certain other female main characters are. She's a bit on the anorexic side, but generally reasonable.

However, one has to doubt her smartness! She's a lawyer, so supposedly trained for years and years in logical thinking. Yet when her boss calls her to get a status update, she goes, "Duh, I don't know! Where am I going? I'm really not sure" when everyone playing the game knows clearly what her destination is from the material she's read. Instead of talking reasonably with her fiance Dan, she acts like his doormat, and worries that he won't like her being such an 'explorer' (i.e. walking along a river). Her comment when she sees a wet oar? "Oooooh yucchy, I have to get someone to fetch it for me because *I* won't touch something that icky". Her talks with her best friend are shopping-raves about Bloomingdale's. So they start with this character that SHOULD be a great one, and promptly turn her into a dirt-fearing shop-hound airhead girly-girl. Ah well.

The sound is nice if a bit repetitive, and the dialogues are very repetitive. I tended to hop through most of them while playing, just reading the words. There was a LOT of back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth mindless shuttle missions, where you talked to X, who said to talk to Y, who then said to talk to X, who then said to talk to Z. What made it even worse is that I easily played the first half of the game one evening and was planning on saving at the end of the second "area" (there are only 4). Instead, the game crashed on me! So now I had to go back through those entire inane walking puzzles which required no thought at all but lots of clicking.

In general the puzzles weren't very difficult at all. The objects you found were obvious, and in some cases even where there *might* have been some thought involved, they shoehorned you into doing it a certain way. Many of them were random. You find four cards for an organ. Just randomly stick them in until one works, and the rest instantly vanish. If you did that one first, you would never have gotten to hear the other songs.

Still, the gorgeous painting-graphics are lovely, and it's always refreshing to see a female lead character, even if she is a bit of an air-head. The ending is very disappointing, though, and you can win the game in about 8 hours. Hopefully a sequel will come out with the character a bit more mature, and with a world which is more interactive. Until then, I'll pass the CDs along to friends, to let them give it a try!

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece in Every Way!
Review: I am ABSOLUTELY relieved that games of such magnificent quality still exist! Imagine the game you have played with the best graphics, storyline, character development, etc. and Syberia will surpass even the very best!
I agree with every point that Charles Ardai, Computer Gaming World, has made. Syberia is likely to be underappreciated, most probably because Adventure games are not what they used to be, and therefore people may be wary of taking a chance. This is the best game I have ever bought, and a fabulous value! (Nearly $20 less than most games you will find) Still not convinced? Let me address some of Syberia's impressive points:
I have praised the graphics, and for a good reason! Not only do the graphics in the foreground and characters look completely realistic, but the creators have taken such care that you will notice superb quality in the furthest depths of the screen. Even the tiniest details have been perfected as you see leaves rustling and water rippling. Transition between screenshots is seamless. There is never a moment where my game has frozen, crashed, or even the sound or graphics faltered. Mr. Ardai is correct in saying that Myst will look like a crayon drawing in comparison. It is absolutely perfect.
I mentioned the character development and storyline as two separate descriptions, yet I believe that they work together to make excellent gameplay. Each character has a unique identity that causes you to grow so close to them and feel that you really know the person (or automaton in Oscar's case). For example, we do not meet Hans Voralberg until the end of the game, yet I felt as if I knew him personally through the cutscenes and especially through Anna's diary. Also, Kate (our main character) is connected to her real life in New York through her cell phone. As we witness her conversations, we see a change in her attitude towards her lifestyle, and her reevaluation of her relationship. This is definately a game you will feel passionate not just about 'beating', but for the resolution and to see what becomes of our characters. I was so completely involved, that I will admit that I even shed a few tears as I learned more about our characters throughout gameplay. I am not the only one, however, as wysewomon, an amazon.com top 1000 reviewer, stated, "I cheered at Kate's ultimate decision about her life.".
There are many other points I could make to attempt to convince the masses to purchase this game, but nothing else than to purchase the most fantastic, 'feel-good' game you will ever play!

Rating:
Summary: Very good game
Review: I found this game to be fun and filled with facts. Some I already knew and some I didn't. The graphics, I loved them. Needed a sweater. I found a couple of the puzzles to be too easy but who complains when on the whole the game was well worth the money I paid for it.

Rating:
Summary: An Astounding Piece of Art
Review: I can't quite say what it was that drew me to buy Syberia. I simply saw it on the shelf and picked it up for some reason. Then I put it back. Then I picked it up again and read some more of the reviews. Then I put it back down and thought that it would probably be best if I were to save my money for something I actually knew more about.

As you can probably guess, I'm not the most decisive person. I have to admit that Syberia is one of the best computer games I have bought since Myst III. Actually, it probably is the best computer game I've bought since Myst III. As a writer I have always been drawn to games with a definate plot, such as The Journeyman Project and Myst. Syberia met and surpassed my expectations. The graphics are stunning, but the really astonishing thing about this game is the characters, who are brought to life with some of the best voice acting I have heard in this type of game. Each and every one has a solid personality and identity that invites you to learn more about them. The character of Hans, for example, is one that you learn about very slowly until you get an impression of him that, when you finally do meet him, seems both an exageration and an understatement. The plot and the subplots are interwoven to guide the shaping of the main character, allowing development like I have never seen in this particular genre. Some have complained that it is too short, and I must admit that I hardly wanted the game to end. I would say that the reason for how short it seems is not that the story itself is short, but rather the fact that once you have started you will find it almost impossible to stop until you have reached a conclusion, much like the main character in this story. The ending is somewhat open ended, but the execution makes a statement about the character that I personally find to be both inspiring and enchanting. In fact I felt a strong desire to follow. In short, if you're going to spend $...on a game, spend it on Syberia.