Yahtzee touched on this problem in his
Use Key on Door article. I haven't played Syberia so I can't comment on that but it does seem that sometimes games have been reduced to just clicking on everything until something new happens. Part of the problem is that people have come to expect the streamlined interface so going back to a more complex setup is swimming against the flow.
From what I saw of Future Boy in the demo, this could be a good game to get back some of that complexity of interaction. I didn't have any "guess the word" problems that were so common in many of the old text adventuresso this might be the way.
