Syberia 3
Syberia 3’ s seven-year delay wasn’t long enough.
The original launch of Syberia3 was planned by French developer Microids for June 2010, a whopping seven years ago. It was a different, sparser time for adventure games. In that desperate age, when there was a dearth of fantastical romps full of puzzles, Syberia3 could have potentially gotten by on novelty alone. Seven years later, however, it simply feels creaky, dated and surprisingly rushed. How do you reintroduce players to a series 13 years after the last game? Typically, the answer is a quick recap. Developer Microids bucks convention by… well, not doing anything at all. Syberia3 continues Kate Walker’s adventure through Russia without a second of exposition, necessitating a quick browse of Wikipedia.
The previous games were driven by the mystery of the island of Syberia, but that’s all behind Kate as she embarks on a more aimless journey. She’s now latched onto the plight of the Youkol, the nomads introduced in Syberia II.
Kate’s also on the run from her law firm, a private investigator they sent after her and sinister military forces, each contributing to a mess of threads that never transform into anything cohesive, hanging on a dull story that frequently makes no sense.
Joining the ex-lawyer are an assortment of tropes masquerading as humans. Evil hypnotists, a curmudgeonly inventor, a drunk ship captain, a race of noble savages— everyone in Syberia3 feels like they were bought from a factory of prefabricated NPCs, testing the limits of triteness. And while writing can elevate even the dullest of clichés, here it merely exacerbates things. Nobody in Syberia3 comes close to talking like a human being. Every sentence is a new disaster, full of bizarre word choices, appalling delivery, and even wrong information. The captain, for instance, keeps calling the deck of his ship the bridge, which creates a big problem when you’re trying to follow his directions.
It’s a shame, because Syberia3 tries to do interesting things with dialogue, allowing players to choose Kate’s tone, sometimes, or pick options to manipulate characters. It’s a bit like Telltale’s system, and it even builds on it, revealing Kate’s internal monologue as she grapples with the choices she can make.
The move to 3D has done the game no favours. Gone are the gorgeous prerendered scenes of the previous games, replaced with ugly 3D environments. Much of the game is spent sauntering around a village dominated by a nondescript dock and an equally forgettable ferry. Things do pick up once Kate hits Baranour, an abandoned amusement park that evokes Pripyat’s fairground, but even that misses the mark, never reaching the heights of striking Aralbad or the imposing Romansburg monastery of the other Syberia games.
Navigating these environments is a chore. Regardless of what control method you use, Kate moves like a tank through mud, struggling to even walk up stairs, and that’s when the camera isn’t obscuring everything.
On thin ice
The issues even get in the way of the one bright spot in this dreary adventure: puzzles. Most of them involve tinkering with mechanical and logical conundrums, all gears, levers and buttons. But trying to select hot spots, particularly with a controller, is a miserable experience.
It’s the bugs that threaten the puzzles, however. In one headscratcher, taking too long made half of the buttons on my controller stop working. In another, I was able to use an object I hadn’t even picked up to solve part of a puzzle, only to become confused when I had to then search for it to complete the rest of the task.
There are few places where Syberia3 doesn’t get it wrong, but even its high points suffer from problems. It would’ve been better if the series had ended with Kate waving to Hans as he rode off on his mammoth at the end of the last game instead of this unnecessary sequel.
Nobody in Syberia 3 comes close to talking like a human being