Ghost_Of_SAS
Syberia 3 is a huge disappointment: bad controls, bad interface, bad camera, bad voice acting, obtuse puzzle design and a frustrating cliffhanger ending bring down the third chapter of a classic trilogy.
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I've been a fan of Syberia ever since the first one back in 2002, and while the sequel wasn't as good, I was excited to see a third one happen thirteen years after the fact. Unfortunately the shift to the third dimension hasn't done Kate Walker's story any favors: the classic point&click interface has been replaced with a control scheme designed around a controller; you can still play the game with just a mouse, but it’s painfully obvious from the start that it’s not the ideal way to do so: something as simple as pointing and clicking on an interactive object has become clunky, especially if two or more objects are grouped nearby and you need to highlight a specific one, which is extremely frequent. Kate’s pathfinding is also not great, and you’ll often have to click multiple times to find the spot where the camera decides to move and let you see the rest of the area.
Play with a controller then? Well, yes... and no. While this makes navigating the environment much easier (left stick to move and R2 to run), interacting with it is just as difficult: you use the right analog stick to pan the camera around, which targets whichever interactive hotspot is closest to the center of the screen or, in screens with a fixed camera, cycles between objects, only that’s extremely temperamental, leading to a lot of frustration. There are times when the right stick controls both the rotation of the camera around an object, for example a complex piece of machinery that has to be interacted with from all angles, and the selection of interactive spots on it, meaning you will have to fiddle with the camera until you manage to select the one you need. Considering that some puzzles give you a dozen buttons and levers to press and pull, and sometimes I would swear there was no way to get the analog stick to select a certain item, you can see how that would quickly become an aggravation. The result is that you get the feeling that none of the control schemes have been optimized and you end up having to switch between controller and mouse, which should never happen in any game. There is also an annoying slowness to everything: the panning of the camera, scrolling the menus to select objects, turning pages in the documents you need to consult for puzzle solutions, or even simply slowly strolling around certain huge areas with nothing in them to do, it’s just a slog.
Then there are the precision puzzles and oh boy… that’s when things really go south. There are multiple of these, in which you are expected to use the analog stick to precisely control a rotating dial or valve, holding it at a very specific angle, which is not very responsive; good on paper but poor in execution, which adds a whole new layer of frustration due to the game not responding to your commands while you are trying to figure out the solution to a puzzle that wasn’t that intuitive to start with. Even something simple like turning a key in its slot has been mapped to analog input, and no, it often doesn’t work well either. It does not help that the puzzle design is obtuse, and I say this knowing very well that Syberia belongs to that particular school of early-2000s French adventure games with intentionally complicated Myst-style puzzles; no, here the puzzles range from absolutely inscrutable (a waterfall you have to purify with barely any visual feedback) to random (fiddling with a gear stick to keep a gauge in the green and winning not knowing how) to busywork (obvious solution but a long boring series of passages and unskippable animations to achieve it). There is also quite a bit of pixel hunting: it’s easy to miss certain poorly visible key items, expecially if you choose the controller scheme, or because they were just off to the right in a static puzzle screen and nothing indicated that you had to pan the camera to see them. As a result, be ready to make multiple slow-jog passes through the areas of the game hoping to chance by the item you’ve missed because the camera was a wide shot or simply didn’t focus on it. On top of that, you often get the feeling of finding the solution before the problem, doing something whose purpose is unclear because the game hasn’t presented you with the related roadblock yet. Here’s how good puzzle design works: first show me a locked door, then give me a key. Never the other way around.
So the gameplay and puzzles are not the greatest, but you can forgive a lot to a game if the story is good and the characters are relatable. Unfortunately Syberia 3 stumbles even on that front: while Kate Walker and her friends are generally fairly well written, animated and voiced (the original cast reprise their roles in this), the new side characters are definitely not. It is very common to hear a voice that completely mismatches the character, for example a sour middle-aged Russian doctor has been given a young, almost sensual voice that’s entirely jarring, or a large elderly matron or an elderly man sound like they are in their twenties. Other characters sound like they were voiced by members of the development team reading lines in a language that’s not their native one, rather than professional actors. This effect is somewhat mitigated as the game progresses and the only characters you interact with are the main ones, but it is extremeley noticeable early on when the areas are more populated. The music is absolutely fantastic though, definitely the high point of the game: Inon Zur of Syberia 2, Dragon Age and Fallout fame delivers an amazing score that is very likely to end up in your playlist. On the other hand the game is nothing more than visually adequate: textures and animations are passable, it looks like a game from ten years ago, but that is to be expected for a relatively low budget production. It runs in Unity and that allows for some pretty good lighting here and there.
The story is mostly good, somewhat less charming than the original Syberia, but at the very least on par with the second. Kate Walker is always likable and the plot hints at trouble brewing for her, which sadly ends up unresolved, and that’s because of one glaring problem: without spoiling anything, the game ends in a shameful cliffhanger that not so much teases, rather shouts a sequel that I see as very unlikely to happen considering the poor reception the game had. I simply do not understand why game developers decide to not conclude a story when they barely manage to have a third game funded after over a decade of radio silence. Isn’t a good satisfying ending better than a cliffhanger for a sequel that will never be made? There is also a single piece of DLC, which you would think would be a conclusion to the story, but isn’t. In fact half of it are recycled cutscenes from the base game (and from the DLC itself!) and it is so short and barely interactive that it’s downright insulting. It doesn’t even contain a single puzzle.
At the end of it all, Syberia 3 hurts, it hurts that a much beloved series like this couldn’t get the sendoff that it deserved, both because of the quality of the game itself and because they decided to not conclude the story. As it is, I cannot recommend it to anyone other than the most hardcore Syberia or adventure game fans. If ever a Syberia 4 happens, and I hope it does, it has to deliver a more polished product than this.
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I've been a fan of Syberia ever since the first one back in 2002, and while the sequel wasn't as good, I was excited to see a third one happen thirteen years after the fact. Unfortunately the shift to the third dimension hasn't done Kate Walker's story any favors: the classic point&click interface has been replaced with a control scheme designed around a controller; you can still play the game with just a mouse, but it’s painfully obvious from the start that it’s not the ideal way to do so: something as simple as pointing and clicking on an interactive object has become clunky, especially if two or more objects are grouped nearby and you need to highlight a specific one, which is extremely frequent. Kate’s pathfinding is also not great, and you’ll often have to click multiple times to find the spot where the camera decides to move and let you see the rest of the area.
Play with a controller then? Well, yes... and no. While this makes navigating the environment much easier (left stick to move and R2 to run), interacting with it is just as difficult: you use the right analog stick to pan the camera around, which targets whichever interactive hotspot is closest to the center of the screen or, in screens with a fixed camera, cycles between objects, only that’s extremely temperamental, leading to a lot of frustration. There are times when the right stick controls both the rotation of the camera around an object, for example a complex piece of machinery that has to be interacted with from all angles, and the selection of interactive spots on it, meaning you will have to fiddle with the camera until you manage to select the one you need. Considering that some puzzles give you a dozen buttons and levers to press and pull, and sometimes I would swear there was no way to get the analog stick to select a certain item, you can see how that would quickly become an aggravation. The result is that you get the feeling that none of the control schemes have been optimized and you end up having to switch between controller and mouse, which should never happen in any game. There is also an annoying slowness to everything: the panning of the camera, scrolling the menus to select objects, turning pages in the documents you need to consult for puzzle solutions, or even simply slowly strolling around certain huge areas with nothing in them to do, it’s just a slog.
Then there are the precision puzzles and oh boy… that’s when things really go south. There are multiple of these, in which you are expected to use the analog stick to precisely control a rotating dial or valve, holding it at a very specific angle, which is not very responsive; good on paper but poor in execution, which adds a whole new layer of frustration due to the game not responding to your commands while you are trying to figure out the solution to a puzzle that wasn’t that intuitive to start with. Even something simple like turning a key in its slot has been mapped to analog input, and no, it often doesn’t work well either. It does not help that the puzzle design is obtuse, and I say this knowing very well that Syberia belongs to that particular school of early-2000s French adventure games with intentionally complicated Myst-style puzzles; no, here the puzzles range from absolutely inscrutable (a waterfall you have to purify with barely any visual feedback) to random (fiddling with a gear stick to keep a gauge in the green and winning not knowing how) to busywork (obvious solution but a long boring series of passages and unskippable animations to achieve it). There is also quite a bit of pixel hunting: it’s easy to miss certain poorly visible key items, expecially if you choose the controller scheme, or because they were just off to the right in a static puzzle screen and nothing indicated that you had to pan the camera to see them. As a result, be ready to make multiple slow-jog passes through the areas of the game hoping to chance by the item you’ve missed because the camera was a wide shot or simply didn’t focus on it. On top of that, you often get the feeling of finding the solution before the problem, doing something whose purpose is unclear because the game hasn’t presented you with the related roadblock yet. Here’s how good puzzle design works: first show me a locked door, then give me a key. Never the other way around.
So the gameplay and puzzles are not the greatest, but you can forgive a lot to a game if the story is good and the characters are relatable. Unfortunately Syberia 3 stumbles even on that front: while Kate Walker and her friends are generally fairly well written, animated and voiced (the original cast reprise their roles in this), the new side characters are definitely not. It is very common to hear a voice that completely mismatches the character, for example a sour middle-aged Russian doctor has been given a young, almost sensual voice that’s entirely jarring, or a large elderly matron or an elderly man sound like they are in their twenties. Other characters sound like they were voiced by members of the development team reading lines in a language that’s not their native one, rather than professional actors. This effect is somewhat mitigated as the game progresses and the only characters you interact with are the main ones, but it is extremeley noticeable early on when the areas are more populated. The music is absolutely fantastic though, definitely the high point of the game: Inon Zur of Syberia 2, Dragon Age and Fallout fame delivers an amazing score that is very likely to end up in your playlist. On the other hand the game is nothing more than visually adequate: textures and animations are passable, it looks like a game from ten years ago, but that is to be expected for a relatively low budget production. It runs in Unity and that allows for some pretty good lighting here and there.
The story is mostly good, somewhat less charming than the original Syberia, but at the very least on par with the second. Kate Walker is always likable and the plot hints at trouble brewing for her, which sadly ends up unresolved, and that’s because of one glaring problem: without spoiling anything, the game ends in a shameful cliffhanger that not so much teases, rather shouts a sequel that I see as very unlikely to happen considering the poor reception the game had. I simply do not understand why game developers decide to not conclude a story when they barely manage to have a third game funded after over a decade of radio silence. Isn’t a good satisfying ending better than a cliffhanger for a sequel that will never be made? There is also a single piece of DLC, which you would think would be a conclusion to the story, but isn’t. In fact half of it are recycled cutscenes from the base game (and from the DLC itself!) and it is so short and barely interactive that it’s downright insulting. It doesn’t even contain a single puzzle.
At the end of it all, Syberia 3 hurts, it hurts that a much beloved series like this couldn’t get the sendoff that it deserved, both because of the quality of the game itself and because they decided to not conclude the story. As it is, I cannot recommend it to anyone other than the most hardcore Syberia or adventure game fans. If ever a Syberia 4 happens, and I hope it does, it has to deliver a more polished product than this.