Syberia

Drew has pledged to slowly but slowly churn his way through his sizeable stack of Nintendo Switch games for his ‘Beat the Backlog’ feature. Check out his main article to see what games he’s completed already!
Syberia is a game that has occupied a lot more space in my brain than it should. Mostly, it’s because I know I bought the first game ages ago and hadn’t played it, yet the sequels are continually going on sale on the Nintendo eShop and it regularly takes a good amount of willpower for me not to add them to my backlog, since they’re all ridiculously cheap. But if this seemingly neverending feature has taught me anything, it’s that I shouldn’t just spring for a game because there’s a deal on! (I can’t be handing out ten of the King’s English willynilly – not in this economy!) So, in a bid to scratch the itch and see if I should buy the whole lot, I fired up the original Syberia to give it a go.
The game opens with a rather macabre scene, where a young woman stands in the rain, watching as a group of clockwork robots march past in a funeral procession. The automatons have a terrifying look about them, sporting a bleak dystopian look and a horror movie shuddering gait that immediately gave me the heebie-jeebies. We quickly learn that the woman is Kate Walker, a lawyer from the US and our main protagonist. She’s been sent by her employer to the decrepit industrial town of Valadilene in the French Alps, expecting to broker the purchase of the stuttering Voralberg Mechanical Toy and Puppet Factory, which has been in decline for some years. The deal hits an early snag however, when Kate learns that the owner of the company, Anna Voralberg, has recently passed away, and rumours that her brother, Hans, long thought dead, may still be alive, throwing legal red tape all over the ownership rights and the prospective sale. What follows is a rather jumbled journey across backwater Europe, as Kate tries to track down the family’s prodigal son and finalise the deal for the factory.
There’s no denying that the premise is an odd one, and this oddness seemingly permeates every nook and cranny of Syberia. Nobody Kate encounters seems to have a normal relationship with the world around them, and are all incredibly obstructive in the most bizarre ways possible, just to facilitate some of the strangest puzzle solving I’ve ever experienced. From a lawyer who won’t open the door unless he can read the reason for your arrival through his steampunk Ring doorbell, to a mining supervisor with a debilitating celebrity obsession dating back 30-years, to an aging starlet who’s verve for life can only be restored by tasting a specific cocktail that’s made in a lone hotel bar half the world away – this is gamifying at its best (worst?).
At a Glance

Date originally released: |
18/03/1999 |
Date added to backlog: |
31/12/2023 |
Positives |
Negatives |
+ Attractive pre-rendered backgrounds + Throwback point-and-click silliness |
– Odd puzzle design that modern players may find eyerolling – Ancient UI – Some outdated language which might offend |
Available on: |
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The most egregious puzzle surrounds a train station which has been turned into an aviary (for some reason); you have to gather a specific item to shoo away a bunch of ankle high birds that are “guarding” a ladder. You do this in order to collect a bird egg, which you then place in a 20-year old locking mechanism before turning on the machine housed inside. The whole sequence is incredibly silly, which could be both a blessing and a curse – players of a certain age will find a lot of nostalgia in such ridiculously insular logic, but modern players will undoubtedly find it all rather eyerolling and daft.
The game is fully voice-acted, and while that was something of a luxury for the time, it’s met with mixed results. Perhaps due to the aforementioned awkwardness, none of the characters in the game are especially likeable, including Kate, whose particular brand of optimism comes across as being annoyingly condescending. Oscar, the Voralberg automaton who you help reassemble and activate, is the best of the bunch, but that’s perhaps his pickiness actually makes sense, being an incredibly limited logic engine, as he is. Kate will sporadically take calls from a few folks back home, making sure she’s alright – but they’re all complete headcases! Her fiance, Dan, is a passive-aggressive douchebag, while her boss, Mr Marson, is just downright aggressive, and her best friend, Olivia, seems to be the worst kind of gaslighting narcissist. It’s hardly surprising that Kate’s happy wandering about in the arse-end of Europe – anything to escape this lot!
Visually, I got exactly what I had hoped for with Syberia – lovely pre-rendered backgrounds, gleaming with awkward lighting and plagued by all manner of strange clipping. It’s textbook early-2000s and I love it. These wonderfully depicted environments and slightly waxwork character models are exactly what drew me into buying the game in the first place! The locations, random as they may be, are all expressively drawn, and there seems to be an air of timeless mystery about almost everywhere Kate visits. I particularly enjoyed the once grand Hotel Kronsky, which has the same dusty grandeur as many of the locations found in Resident Evil.
The FMV sequences (full motion video, for you young’ns) are crisp and clean, sporting what were probably pretty high end graphics for the period, though Kate does look a little Uncanny Valley by today’s standards. The UI has easily aged the worst, with horrible pop-out menus and sporting an array of ugly, yet free fonts, the like you’d see on 1001fonts.com. There’s something incredibly jarring about seeing a default Windows handwriting font in a mysterious diary, though, in fairness, I imagine that cost and time constraints may have made the alternative something of a pain to source.

This adventure isn’t the most enthralling nor the puzzles the most engaging, and it took me a slow 5-6 hours to complete Syberia, finding most, but not all, of the optional elements along the way. However, in a nice touch, you are rewarded for your thoroughness with bits of concept artwork, allowing you to peek behind the curtain at the making of the game, which I’m always a fan of.
Syberia is absolutely of its time, offering a point-and-click adventure that now seems outdated in almost every aspect. With aging character models, an archaic and ugly UI and whole townships blatantly designed to facilitate a few oddball puzzles, it’s unlikely to win over many new fans in 2025. That said, it’s not all bad – the pre-rendered environments still look pretty decent, and there’s a few moments so ridiculous that you’ll likely get a laugh or two. Perhaps like the clockwork automatons in the Voralberg factory, Syberia is a product of a bygone era, but not without significance to those curious about days gone by.
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