The fact that they’re so incompetent, and become so reliant on strong and tall American Kate Walker to do absolutely everything for them, actually borders a little on offensive, combined with their portrayal as squat, obese catchphrase-spouting foreigners.
There’s not a lot else to the story beyond the constant trials and tribulations the Youkals face at every step of their quest. These Youkals, who ride mythical snow ostrich creatures, embark on a ritual pilgrimage with the ostriches’ migration every 20 years across the continent, and Kate agrees to help them in their journey. In Syberia 3, Kate Walker somehow finds herself half-frozen to death in the Siberian wilds, and is rescued by the nomadic Youkal tribe. This may all be tolerable if the story in Syberia 3 was engrossing, or at least as atmospheric as the previous games. Those entries told a sweet tale of American contract lawyer Kate Walker, who walks out on her job and past life to help a dying genius journey across Europe and Russia to pursue his life’s dream of seeing the last existing woolly mammoths. The hardest puzzles the game throws at you are generally, “Where did this character who was just standing here go? Is the game bugged or did I trigger something to move him?” and “Does this massive, empty area contain a single item I’ll need for my inventory, or is it just a huge waste of time?” In what seems to be a translation error, the aforementioned ship’s captain asks you several times to head to his ship’s ‘bridge’ to solve a puzzle, when in fact he actually means the ‘deck’ of the ship, leading to a lot of frustrating searching in the wrong place. Sometimes triggers or prompts to continue a puzzle will fail to appear, unless you restart the game, or items that should be gone from your inventory appear back in there, confusing whether they can still be used or not. You’ll frequently be unable to climb stairs as your character glitches on and off the first step, or decides not to climb at all if she’s not at the right angle or speed. Running around is also where you’ll encounter the game’s many bugs, which is disappointing given the game’s long development cycle. It makes you go through each and every step that booking an actual ship would require – finding a captain, convincing him to take you on board, refilling the ship’s water tanks, refilling its coal supply, opening the lock, finding where the captain has misplaced his keys… I’m not making up any of those tasks either – you really have to do all that, and a lot of it requires running around a large, expansive, but frustratingly empty town where it seems to take forever to get anywhere. In any other adventure game, this might boil down to one task – find a captain willing to take you, or perhaps, steal a boat. Case in point: At one point of the game, it’s required that you find a ship to carry you across a river. However, most of your time is spent with a great deal of seemingly pointless busy work. There are some decent puzzles strewn throughout the game, the best ones requiring you to examine intricate devices closely and discern their internal operation. Your character moves relative to the camera, not to their own orientation, meaning that each time the camera changes angles (and it does so frequently), you have no choice but to re-orient yourself too.
With a controller, it’s never precisely clear how to select specific objects on screen, which is a pretty integral part of adventure gameplay, resulting in a lot of fiddling around with both analogue sticks. It’s a recommendation I should have ignored. I played the game on PC, and at the game’s recommendation with a controller, rather than the traditional mouse.
The gameplay style is the same as previous point-and-click adventures, focusing on collecting items for your inventory and solving puzzles with them, except updated slightly for modern audiences. Unfortunately, what could have been a nostalgic coda to a unique niche of the adventure game genre has instead bloated to an overlong, buggy, boring and ultimately unnecessary sequel.įrom the outset, Syberia 3 seems confused. Not so, says Sokal, as after an extensive development of around eight years, Syberia 3 now arrives on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. To my satisfaction, the story was completed by the end of Syberia II, to the extent that its themes had reached their conclusion and the journey had wrapped up.
The original two games, desgined by Belgian comic artist Benoit Sokal, were a fresh breath of whimsy, combining a real Eastern European style and atmosphere with fantastical ideas and intricate steampunk contraptions. It’s been over a decade since the Syberia series last captured my attention.