Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the overhauled remake of late director-designer Benoît Sokal’s Amerzone – The Explorer’s Legacy and how it surpassed the sum of its parts to epitomize the pulpy, Vernian adventure I’d always been seeking. Naturally, I was excited to embark on Sokal’s larger project, the Syberia series, but held off until the release of Syberia – Remastered. This recreation of the beloved 2002 point-and-click adventure brings new visuals, controls, and scarce little else. Is a new coat of paint and a little oil in the joints enough to keep this old train rolling? All aboard!
First, I must say that the PS5 build I played through most of the game on was riddled with annoying bugs related to environmental/object interactability and questlog progression, along with a slew of obvious typos in the scripts and readable items. Perhaps my first impression of the game was marred by this. Thankfully, these issues and more have been ironed out just in time for the game’s release, and I can confirm that this is the smoothest way to play the adventure so many seem to cherish.
Syberia follows young American lawyer Kate Walker as she brokers the buyout of a French ‘automaton’ factory by the Universal Toy Company after the factory’s owner, Anna Voralberg, passes. Turns out, though, that Anna’s long-lost brother, the intellectually disabled yet mechanically brilliant Hans, is still alive somewhere, ostensibly chasing traces of mammoths in the semi-fictionalized snows of Syberia. It falls upon Kate Walker to follow Hans’ decades-cold trail and get his signature on the buyout contract with the help of the foppish automaton Oscar (DON’T call him a “robot,” please) and the wind-up train he drives.
There are a lot of thematic and narrative parallels with Amerzone—a young professional follows an old genius’s generations-old footsteps, stopping along the way to repair and maintain their outdated yet fantastical vehicle. Despite this, I found Syberia’s story to be relatively devoid of adventure and its ending very anticlimactic. There’s almost no conflict, besides—*BZZT BZZT BZZT* Oh, Kate’s getting yet another phone call from her overbearing mother, her airheaded best friend, or her childish fiancé, better answer that.
I appreciate that Kate Walker is a strong protagonist with visible growth over the story, but the plot’s progression is less exciting and bogged down with self-referentially menial tasks like hunting for grapes to scare away mean birds blocking a ladder or getting your visa stamped. The problem is that of the four major locations within the six-or-so-hour story, your time is front-loaded in the first two areas, a foggy French village and a grand yet mostly empty university. Just when the later areas seem to get interesting, little happens, and you wind up your train and ride off to the next place.
The most notable change with Syberia – Remastered is the visual upgrade. Now, rather than click around to move Kate between static screens set on 3D-rendered environments, you move with the left stick to freely explore. I like how the camera moves with you but still locks into the familiar framings of the original, meaning new screenshots match the idealized rose-coloured version that lives in fans’ minds. In larger, more nature-focused areas, it looks quite beautiful—close up, though, it looks blotchy and unimpressive. The opening area, especially, felt like more of what I’d expect from a high-budget PS3 game. Then, there’s the strange decision to leave in the unaltered FMV cutscenes of the original, meaning get ready to watch an untextured PS2-era train pull out of blotchy locales, as you wave goodbye to blotchy, unrecognizable NPCs.
In all areas, the colours are somewhat muted and greyed, looking perhaps more real but at the expense of vibrancy and personality. This created a certain cognitive dissonance between the unelaborated steampunk setting and the goofy yet rarely funny characters. There’s a shot from high above the aforementioned university of the ruined remains of the town around it, never expanded upon, never acknowledged. Despite this, the game doesn’t hesitate to throw an eighteen-page diary or a five-minute lecture on mammoths at you. Too much is left unsaid, too much adventure not properly explored, so I felt deflated at times.
Amongst the large and somewhat vacant environments, Kate Walker must do a lot of walking. Some sort of behind-the-scenes collectibles, or bonus puzzles and lore, as were present in Amerzone, could have livened things up. Like Amerzone, the main puzzles are never very challenging, but here they involve a lot of backtracking or jogging between far-flung points, so that your mind has long-since solved any problems while Kate’s feet slowly catch up. The remaster promised new and reworked puzzles. Unfortunately, I can count these additions on one hand—assuming two of my fingers have been blown off by a firecracker. Perhaps two puzzles have an added wrinkle involving picking up more items in the environment or something similarly unstimulating, and some items have new names or redesigned looks. As a whole, Syberia’s puzzles are logical, but scant and uninteresting.
This remaster maintains music and voice acting from the original. I was mostly ambivalent towards the serviceable performance of Kate Walker’s lines, dry and straight as they were amongst a world full of wackadoos whose actors seem to be reading for very different games. Seriously, did the university rectors think they were in a game based on Labyrinth? Some lines’ audio peaks or come across as tinny, but they do hold up well, given their age. What really impressed me was the elegant and unobtrusive soundtrack, composed by Nicholas Varley and Dimitri Bodiansky. There’s just one theme per area, but each delivers personality and intrigue in lieu of pulse-pounding adventure.
The incredibly atmospheric music is what really made me consider the effect Syberia seems to have over its fans. The whole experience is slow, purposefully so. It hinges on drawing you into its slightly magical world and off-kilter vibe. These allured me enough to want to continue with the rest of the series, which hopefully lives up to the promise of its premise, as the solo outing of Amerzone did for me. As much as I wanted to love Syberia, I was never fully grabbed and, in fact, was repelled by its straightforward and slow puzzles and the story that goes nowhere (and not even fast, at that!). If Amerzone was pure pulpy fun, Syberia is one of those disappointing magazines with an amazing cover illustration.
