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.
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