Wirdschowerdn
Ph.D. in World Saving
So apart from the technical issues, how is the game holding up as an adventure?
hey, it actually has puzzlesSo apart from the technical issues, how is the game holding up as an adventure?
Syberia 3 review
By Fraser Brown 4 hours ago
Syberia 3’s original launch was planned for June, 2010, a whopping seven years ago. It was a different, sparser, time for adventure games. 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. Seven years later, however, it simply feels creaky, dated and surprisingly rushed.
How do you reintroduce players to a series 13 years after the last game? Typically, the answer is a quick recap. Developer Microids bucks convention by… well, not doing anything at all. 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.
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. She latches onto the plight of the Youkol, the diminutive nomads introduced in Syberia 2. 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.
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.
Joining the ex-lawyer are an assortment of tropes masquerading as humans. 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. And while writing can elevate even the dullest of cliches, here it merely exacerbates the problem.
Blaming translation issues—Microids is a French studio—would be generous. 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. Every sentence is a new disaster, full of absolutely bizarre word choices, appalling delivery and occasionally even wrong information. 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.
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. 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.
The move to 3D has done the game no favours. Gone are the gorgeous pre-rendered scenes of the previous games, replaced with plain, often downright ugly, three-dimensional environments. 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. 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.
Navigating these environments is also a terrible chore. 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.
These issues even get in the way of the one bright spot in this otherwise dreary adventure: puzzles. Most of them involve tinkering with satisfyingly mechanical and mostly logical conundrums, all gears and levers and enigmatic buttons. A hint of physics enhances their tactile nature, making them feel all the more tangible and even slightly playful. But trying to select hot spots, particularly with a controller, is a miserable experience, making even the most simple brain teasers lessons in frustration.
It’s the bugs that really threaten the puzzles, however. In one head-scratcher, taking too long made half of the buttons on my controller stop working. I had to reload the game three times to an autosave from a few minutes before. In another, I was able to use an object I hadn’t even picked up to solve part of a puzzle, only to become confused when I had to then search for it to complete the rest of the task.
There are few places where Syberia 3 doesn’t get it completely wrong, and even its high points suffer from notable problems. It would have been better if the series had ended with Kate waving goodbye to Hans as he rode off on his mammoth at the end of the last game instead of this unnecessary resurrection.
The Verdict
30
Read our review policy
Syberia 3
Some solid puzzles can’t rescue what is an otherwise terrible adventure game.
http://www.gry-online.pl/S020.asp?ID=11973Syberia 3 arrived too early. It's an adventure with a soul that wants to share a great story with us all. So why, oh why, do I get so angry with this game? I played it, I was amazed, I was furious, I forgave it, and then I played it again. Hopefully some serious patches will fix the most pressing issues and the game will become great again.
https://geekreply.com/reviews/2017/04/24/syberia-3-review-great-game-held-back-major-misstepsMy overall impressions of Syberia 3 is that the game has a lot of potential. A beautiful story, engaging gameplay, and aesthetically pleasing graphics make this game worth your time. However, control issues, optimization problems, and poor voice acting hinder what would otherwise be an amazing experience. The major issues of the game (outside of the voice acting) can be fixed with a series of patches, so it may be worth your while to hold off for a few weeks and see if the developer follows through on their promises to further optimize Syberia 3.
I’d say Syberia 3 is a good buy for those who like a combination of adventure and puzzles in their games. Those looking for a polished experience, however, should wait before pulling the trigger on this $40.00 game.
You must remember that the 'gaming media', which consists of pretty much only clueless millennials, considers Telltale non-games as the archetype for adventure games.I’d say Syberia 3 is a good buy for those who like a combination of adventure and puzzles in their games. - As opposed to to people who dont like puzzles in their point and click? FFS
You'll have to buy 3 copies to get a game as good as Dragon Age 2.I'll get this when 50% off and a dozen patches have been released. I don't give a fuck about "professional" scores.
I’d say Syberia 3 is a good buy for those who like a combination of adventure and puzzles in their games. - As opposed to to people who dont like puzzles in their point and click? FFS
It seems his son also worked on the game.Still it makes me sad for Benoit Sokal. Guy is a legit artist and I do remember when Syberia 1 was considered important enough to be featured in mainstream newspapers.
Why play this when you already dislike the first two Syberia games?So far (I've just set sail on the cruiser, so I'd say I've seen a good chunk of the game already) this game has been just terribly dull with boring, simplistic puzzles, extremely annoying natives that I am supposed to care about for some reason, and not a single good character or scene. It's not even mediocre, it's just plain bad. I have to side with reviewers on this one.
[27/04/2017] Patch Note:
- Corrected crash when the game launched
- Improved performance
- On some machines only, the game was a bit jerky throughout. We corrected this problem.
- For players who are still having issues with the smoothness, please contact our support team. http://support.syberia3.com/
- Added C++ Redistributable 2010 & 2012 installation
- Improved how achievements are unlocked
- O spirits, are you there?
- The scriptwriter's nightmare
- Improved voice/sub-title synchronization during certain cut-scenes (all languages)
- Corrected a problem with the hospital lobby camera, which occasionally locked
- Added a phrase by Kurk during the attack by the monster on the Krystal.
- Corrected various display bugs on the Krystal (clipping, etc.)
- Corrected various bugs in the theme park. Sometimes the stairs were a bit of a problem
- Improved and corrected atmosphere and lighting
- Corrected a bug where the music stopped when you went back to the main menu
- Improved and corrected text in Polish, Korean, and Czech
- Extended game compatibility with PC controllers (dual sticks)
30 rating by the people who put Life is strange in top-25 adventure games of all time. 'k
Wot I Don’t Think: Syberia 3
By John Walker on April 29th, 2017 at 11:00 am.
There is a group of people who are going to buy Syberia 3 [official site], and they are going to love Syberia 3, no matter what it’s like. If the released game were just a black screen from which only terrifying abuse were endlessly screamed, they would love it. If playing it caused them to develop sores all over their bodies, grow pustules that bubbled and burned, and wretched sickness and diarrhoea bugs afflict them and all their loved ones, they would refuse to hear a word said against it. If the game came to the homes of their families and stole all their valuables, and then sold those valuables and used the proceeds to take out an advertising campaign in which they stated, “Everyone who loves Syberia 3 is a paedophile”, these people would still love Syberia 3, and send threatening messages to anyone who disagreed.
How do I know this? Because, man, I was there for Syberia 2, man.
The original Syberia was released in 2002, a time during which I paid my rent by writing reviews of the endless sloughing of barely translated adventure games from Europe into our shores. Games like Curse: The Eye Of Isis, Dracula (Resurrection), The Black Mirror, Schizm: Mysterious Journey, and Jerusalem: The 3 Roads To The Holy Land. (All of which are reviewed in my archaic archive of early reviews, fans.) And oh boy, the hate I would receive for giving these dreadful games the low, low marks they deserved. Oh the forum wars that would erupt, the furious missives on the PC Gamer message boards, the angry letters. Because, as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, adventure game fans are like heroin addicts: any game is a hit.
Into this mire of bubbling shite appeared Syberia, looking like it was going to be exactly the same as the rest, the same overly glossy pre-rendered sheen, the same generic white 20-something like-a-cop female with a mobile phone that starred in 90% of them, the same ludicrous premise and cruddy menus. Here I went again, I thought. And then, out of the blue, like a shining golden goblet atop a mountain of rotting arse, it was… fine.
I gave it 78%! This was a game about a New York lawyer who’d been sent to France to sort out some sort of issue with a will over a clockwork toy factory. Why? Because it was 2002, man, you weren’t there. But as dull as that premise might sound, it belied a sweet, moving story of a broken family, an attempt to understand the life of a recently deceased brilliant mind, and the experience of his astonishing (well, impossible) clockwork automatons. It dealt with autism with a delicate hand, in an era when it still wasn’t being sensibly discussed. And it wasn’t terrible!
It wasn’t great, of course. It was fine. Fine! Which, in those dire years, meant it was The Holy One, to be revered like the appearance of Jesus in some bridge mold, adventure game fans making pilgrimages to its birthplace. So, when two years later a sequel was released, expectations were high. Or, you know, moderate, because the first game had been fine.
The second game was, perhaps rather predictably, pretty rubbish. It threw aside the calm, genteel air of the original, ignored its sensible, solveable puzzles, and instead embraced the cold, spiky arms of every other bloody awful adventure of the time. As I wrote in 2004, “this incarnation contains horrid Myst-like metallic pattern-solving monstrosities. Just like all the rest. And in keeping with the wretched genre, there are no clues as to what you should be doing, and no tangible rewards for stumbling upon the solution. Just the usual blind clicking until something goes clunk.”
But no one was allowed to say so. Syberia had been the game that Proved Them Right! The game that didn’t get slaughtered by the non-specialist adventure press. The game even non-junkies rated. When the addicts were trying to claim stinking rhino turds like Schizm II were worth playing, rather than smashing into a billion pieces and scattering those pieces about the universe such that its evil may never be reunited, Syberia was the game they clung to like a life ring in a lake of vomit. So dammit, this sequel was going to be as great, and a legend would be formed! But it wasn’t. It was shit.
The legend persisted, however, and so Syberia 3 is a thing. It was originally intended to appear in 2010, but wow has it slipped. And slipped, and slided, and skidded. But after seven years of seeming like it might never happen, it finally has. Despite the universe’s best efforts.
Microïds’ sale to Anuman Interactive could have killed it, but didn’t. Instead, they stated it would miss its original release date intentions due to negotiations. Come 2011 creator Benoît Sokal admitted that they hadn’t even started the game. A year and a half later, at the end of 2012, it was announced that Sokal had been signed by Anuman to write the game. (Remember – this is the game’s writer finally being contracted to write it a full two and a half years after it’s original release date.) They predicted it’d be out by 2014/15ish. The first trailer for the game appeared in 2016. Ho boy. And then yes, this year, it was complete.
I played the first room and it was already so awful I didn’t want to carry on.
Then I got ill for a week, so I didn’t carry on, and I would rate the flu I’ve had as slightly more fun than that opening room of Syberia 3. It’s been thirteen years since Syberia II, a game that I estimate 99.999% of the population of planet Earth didn’t play, and of the 0.001% who did I imagine most will have forgotten the dreary nothing events that filled it. So I’d estimate that perhaps some sort of introduction might be in order. Some sort of explanation of who Kate Walker is, maybe. Let alone why she’s in some sort of rudimentary hospital ward with a man with no legs. It literally just carries on from the end of the previous game without even a written recap. The arrogance of this is – well, it’s bloody amazing. All credit to you, Microïds, it’s a bold and inventive move, to deliberately alienate just about every single person who could be playing this game. I applaud you.
Saying that, it doesn’t really seem to care much for what it was about before. Gone now is the delicate tale of automatons and tragic creators, picking up instead on a thread of the second game that involved a tribe of diminutive people called the Youkol, who live in a land where mammoths still exist. And now there are snow ostriches, and they want to go for a walk or something for fucks sake. Fortunately Kate is white and American enough to save the day.
This is a game so embarrassingly poor that when a guy was here to service our boiler I turned it down until I could barely hear it myself, for fear of what a complete stranger I’ll never see again might think of me for hearing what I’m doing from the next room. This is a game that contains lines of dialogue, unquestioningly read aloud by English-speaking actors, that go like:
“I did warn you, you know you can’t be at all well enough yet to deserve to be released already.”
And yeah, sorry, no. Playing this game is actively horrible. A message appears when it loads stating, “The game is more enjoyable if you play using a controller”. Those are never words you want to read when starting a point-and-click adventure, because it means one thing only: something went really wrong.
Something went really wrong. This is, somehow in 2017, a third-person game with tank controls. Kate must be rotated and pointed forward before moving, like no one has ever wanted in any game in all of history. Then, in order to really create that nostalgic feel of the early 2000s, the camera cuts and jumps about as Kate moves through a location, such that the direction you were just pointing her in no longer works. And then things are only interactive when you’ve cumbersomely steered her into them. And then you want to stop playing because no, no, games don’t need to be this bad any more.
They redrafted the same voice actor who spoke Kate’s lines in the first two, one Sharon Mann, but oh boy something’s gone wrong there. It might simply be the passing of time – Mann is fifteen years older than when she recorded for the first game, while Kate’s barely aged a week, and yet her voice now sounds like someone in her 60s. It’s so jarringly peculiar, this seemingly elderly voice coming from a woman in her 20s, although this at least serves to distract from the nonsense she’s speaking.
And then it just cascades – gibberish puzzles, doors magically open because you talked to some random person, traipsing about looking for what minute detail might have changed since you last traipsed through the scene, and a cavalcade of abysmal acting delivering half-translated nonsense.
And that’ll do it, really. Horrible to control, horrible to listen to, really surprisingly ugly to look at, and and all-round mess, I’ve no desire to put myself through this. So, I shall state for the record: Maybe it’s amazing! I mean, it obviously isn’t, because it seems unlikely they’ll fire the voice cast and implement a new control system some hours into the game, but I can’t assure you they haven’t. What I can assure you is I’ve been here too often, seen this too many times, to put myself through it again.
And why would I, anyway, because the people who’ve already decided they’re going to love it will be loving it against all perceptions of reality, and I’m fairly sure at this point in the game series’ life, no one else could care less.
John Walker said:Fortunately Kate is white and American enough to save the day.
You are fake news.And why would I, anyway, because the people who’ve already decided they’re going to love it will be loving it against all perceptions of reality