![]() A hint of physics enhances their tactile nature, making them feel all the more tangible and even slightly playful. Most of them involve tinkering with satisfyingly mechanical and mostly logical conundrums, all gears and levers and enigmatic buttons. These issues even get in the way of the one bright spot in this otherwise dreary adventure: puzzles. Regardless of whether you use mouse and keyboard or, as recommended, a controller, Kate moves like a tank through mud, her poorly animated body struggling to even walk up stairs, and that’s when the camera isn’t doing it’s best to obscure everything. ![]() Navigating these environments is also a terrible chore. ![]() Things do admittedly pick up once Kate hits Baranour, an abandoned amusement park that evokes Pripyat’s haunting fairground, but even that ruin misses the mark, never quite reaching the heights of striking Aralbad or the imposing Romansburg monastery. Much of the game is spent sauntering around a vaguely medieval village dominated by a non-descript dock and an equally forgettable ferry-wonders are few and far between. Gone are the gorgeous pre-rendered scenes of the previous games, replaced with plain, often downright ugly, three-dimensional environments. The move to 3D has done the game no favours. It’s a little like Telltale’s system, but it’s not a direct copy and even builds on it, revealing Kate’s inner-monologue as she grapples with the choices she can potentially make. It’s a particular shame because Syberia 3 actually tries to do some interesting things with dialogue, allowing players to choose Kate’s tone, sometimes, or pick options to manipulate characters. The aforementioned drunk captain, for instance, keeps calling the deck of his ship the bridge, which creates a rather big problem when you’re attempting to follow his directions. Every sentence is a new disaster, full of absolutely bizarre word choices, appalling delivery and occasionally even wrong information. Nobody in Syberia 3 even comes close to talking like a human being, speeding through their lines without any thought given to tone or pacing, their lips flapping away like broken machines. And while writing can elevate even the dullest of cliches, here it merely exacerbates the problem.īlaming translation issues-Microids is a French studio-would be generous. Evil hypnotists, a curmudgeonly inventor, a drunk ship captain, a whole race of, ugh, noble savages-everyone in Syberia 3 feels like they were bought from a factory of prefabricated NPCs, testing the limits of triteness. Joining the ex-lawyer are an assortment of tropes masquerading as humans. 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 tangled threads that never transform into anything cohesive, hanging on a largely dull story that frequently makes no sense. They’re migrating with their huge snow ostriches, but they’ve found themselves a bit stuck, and now only a white American stranger can help them continue their ancient tradition. She latches onto the plight of the Youkol, the diminutive nomads introduced in Syberia 2. The previous games were driven by the mystery of the island of Syberia, where mammoths still thrived, but that’s all behind Kate as she embarks on a considerably more aimless journey. ![]() Syberia 3 continues Kate Walker’s adventure through Russia without even a second of exposition, necessitating, at the very least, a quick browse of Wikipedia. Developer Microids bucks convention by… well, not doing anything at all. How do you reintroduce players to a series 13 years after the last game? Typically, the answer is a quick recap. Seven years later, however, it simply feels creaky, dated and surprisingly rushed. In that desperate age, when there was a dearth of fantastical romps full of puzzles, Syberia 3 could have, potentially, gotten by on novelty alone. It was a different, sparser, time for adventure games. Syberia 3’s original launch was planned for June, 2010, a whopping seven years ago. ![]()
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