There are moments, peppered throughout Syberia, where your character’s cell phone rings and you have to talk to a person from “home” in New York City. It’s an unwelcome chore, and you’ll dislike it when it happens. But that’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel.
Syberia doesn’t have much to work with. It’s a seven year-old adventure game (its sequel is a slightly spryer five), so even though it could well be the most recent great adventure game both history and age weigh upon it. Its story, though charming and folksy, is bare: there is a master toymaker of dubious mental faculties, and he needs to be found. It never gets more complicated than that.
But Syberia raises itself to genre classic on the believability of its curious world. The toymaker, Hans, has touched every step of your journey with his masterful automatons—a completely believable premise since you are riding a mechanical train of his invention, stopping only at the points he has coursed. Of course, the places that accepted this man’s strange gifts are themselves strange, from the gear-powered town of his birth to the grand Russian experiment that was built around his ideas. Every place in the game basked in Han’s genius and withered when he moved on. Following this same sad path gives the game a complete internal consistency that stretches from its art design to its puzzle logic. It’s a tightly composed game that takes very little and composes from it a fully wrought world of rusty gears and broken men.
When you are pulled away from this world by a phone call from your mother or your stupid, petty best friend, it’s jarring. You (and your character) will long for those moments to disappear, to allow you to drift back into the understandable logic and simple truths of Han’s clockwork Europe. As the first game pushes on, the revelations that come over the phone get bigger and more dramatic, but they don’t grow as quickly as your apathy towards them.
The world is so realized and the sense of the journey so profound that when the game ends in a sudden jolt, it’s because there was actually no other way to end it. There is, quite simply, nowhere else to go. The adventure becomes “home.”
Syberia and Syberia II were recently made available for premium members of GameTap.
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