Code:
If you've heard that adventure games are dead, you've heard wrong. Sure,
this once-dominant game genre is now just a shadow of its former self, but it's a
genre that nevertheless manages to produce one or two really impressive games
each year. This year, adventure game fans get treated to Syberia, a product of the
fertile imagination of comic book author and illustrator Benoît Sokal, the man
behind the 1999 adventure game Amerzone. Aside from a few little rough spots,
Syberia is an adventure-game tour de force, with an engrossing story, a truly
imaginative gameworld, and stunning visuals.
A Voralberg toy offers some vital clues.
Syberia's opening scene lets you know you're in for a gaming experience that's out
of the ordinary. On the quaint, aged streets of a tiny town in the French Alps called
Valadilene, an eerie funeral procession makes its way through the rain toward the
local cemetery. A metallic clockwork drummer jerkily clomps along the slick paving
stones, followed by an ornate horse-drawn carriage bearing a coffin. Slowly
following the carriage comes a handful of life-size metal automatons wearing top
hats and holding umbrellas. They continue their solemn, silent march through the
cemetery gates as a lone young woman watches.
This woman turns out to be your alter ego in the game, Kate Walker. Kate is an
associate with the New York law firm of Marson and Lormont, and she's been sent
all the way to Valadilene to secure a major business deal. Valadilene's one claim to
fame is that it's served for centuries as the home of the Voralberg family, makers
of exquisite clockwork toys, puppets, and automatons. While these marvelous
mechanical creations have been sought by collectors and even emperors for
centuries, the days of the Voralberg toys are seemingly numbered.
Syberia plays out in the present day, and as such, electronic toys and video games
are all the rage, and there's little demand for mechanical contrivances, however
ornate and imaginative. Young people have been emigrating from Valadilene in
growing numbers, seeking their fortunes elsewhere since there's no longer much
work to be had at the Voralberg factory.
As a matter of fact, Kate has arrived to facilitate the buyout of Voralberg
Manufacturing by a massive and modern multinational competitor, the Universal
Toy Company. While the sole remaining member of the Voralberg clan, the elderly
Anna Voralberg, had already agreed to the takeover, things quickly go awry when
Kate learns that the funeral procession she just witnessed was for Anna. However,
Kate soon learns that there might be an heir, and a most unexpected one at that.
Thus begins the real adventure of Syberia, as Kate travels to far-flung locales
across Europe and Asia in search of this heir and the clues to his mysterious life.
Syberia features animated characters moving against largely static yet gorgeous 2D
backgrounds. You control Kate by simply moving the cursor and clicking once to
make her walk to a location or twice to make her run. The cursor is context
-sensitive, changing shape to let you know when you can investigate, manipulate,
or pick up an item, or when you can speak with another character. This system and
the inventory screens are largely intuitive and easy to use. Everything is just a
point and a click away.
One of Syberia's many beautiful nature scenes.
When Kate encounters people during her journeys, she'll typically exchange a bit of
dialogue with the other character. If the other character is more than just window
dressing, so to speak, you'll get to instruct Kate to ask the character questions.
Again, this is simply done--just click on one of a few possible topic choices listed
on a notepad to hear what the character has to tell Kate.
Overall, the dialogue tends to sound pretty convincing, despite the occasional poor
translation, like "hangover" instead of "holdover." At times, you'll hear some silly
or clichéd lines, to be sure, but the dialogue is certainly an enormous leap in
quality over the barely coherent nonsense that we've seen in many other
adventure games.
You'll encounter some truly unusual characters throughout Syberia, like the crazed
administrator of an abandoned Soviet industrial town who obsesses over an elderly
opera soprano who once visited the town during its heyday. On one hand, some of
Syberia's lesser characters seem more like caricatures than real people, and the
fact that the voice-overs rarely rise above mediocrity doesn't help. On the other
hand, the main characters receive much better treatment. Anna Voralberg's
interesting life is fleshed out through a diary, a series of voice recordings, and
flashbacks. You learn about Kate and her journey of self-discovery through other
onscreen characters' reactions to her and from her cell phone conversations--some
of which are very strained--with her fiancée, boss, mother, and friend back in New
York. These calls help ground Kate in reality while setting up an even greater
contrast between her everyday life and the dreamlike settings and surreal
predicaments she finds herself in. Despite its uneven character development and
occasional clumsy plot twists, Syberia's melancholy story feels unusually rich, a true
cut above the stories in most other games of this sort. |
