yberia is a stunning new adventure game in the Myst mold, which means that the player controls a single, animated character, guiding it through a series of animated 2-D backgrounds by pointing and clicking with the mouse. To get the character to a spot, the player clicks on it. To get the character to run to a spot, they double click on it. If the cursor passes over something that the character can interact with or examine, such as a factory control panel or a local newspaper, then the cursor changes to a magnifying glass to show that. Syberia contains no twitch elements: it is a relaxed and stately game in which players can take as long as they like to consider their actions.
The hero of Syberia is Kate Walker, a New York lawyer hired to finalize the purchase of an automaton factory located in the European village of Valadilene. The factory has been in the same family for centuries. It has produced toys and wind-up wonders for generations, but it has fallen on hard times and is being sold to a multinational toy company. Unfortunately for Kate, she arrives during the funeral procession of the factory's owner, Anna Voralberg. With Anna dead, Kate must find the deceased woman's brother, Hans, whom no one has seen in years.
The hunt for Hans Voralberg takes Kate through four separate game levels. Kate travels to each in turn on a fantastic wind-up automaton train. Valadilene, the home of the factory, is a typical European village. Barrockstadt is a weird university where Hans apparently studied. Komkolzgrad is a "forgotten Communist space station," and Aralbad is a subtropical resort. All of these locations are beautiful and contain eerie, haunting automatons built by Hans.
A marvelous Myst opportunity
Adventure games are the closest thing to interactive movies that people can purchase. As such, what a player wants out of them is a lead character they can care about, a story line that entertains them and striking visual effects. Syberia has all three of these. Kate's interactions with the game's non-player characters, both the ones she talks to in person and in her cell-phone conversations with her friends, family and co-workers back in New York, reveal her character as it grows and changes throughout the game. The story contains enough mystery and wonder to pull players along. Something seems to be at stake for everyone involved.
The visual effects in Syberia, that is, the animations, the backgrounds and the cutscenes, are all gorgeous. There are striking details on nearly every screen. Most of the settings manage to look beautiful and yet dirty and well-worn all at the same time. The wonderful clockwork automations all look a little neglected, as if they would have been truly wondrous a few years before when they were getting proper care. In other words, the art reinforces the story.
Besides moving through the plot, the other interactive part of Syberia is the puzzles. Fortunately, none of the game's puzzles is as painfully complicated as those in many other adventure games. The designers did a good job of integrating the puzzles into the story instead of creating tacked-on challenges to artificially occupy the player. A beautiful game with a good story and reasonable puzzles, Syberia repays the hours it takes to solve.
There is one thing I dislike about adventure games, and Syberia is not free from it. I hate the need to watch the character walk from one end of an area to the other over terrain I've already seen. Syberia has less of this footstep-retracing than most games, but it still has more than I wanted.
— Eric
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