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This might be of interest. I wrote these notes last year when playing Syberia: TWB for review for Adventure Game Hotspot. Unfortunately, they did not want to publish the review, because my opinion contrasted too strongly with where the game ranked on their year-end top games list. Please keep in mind when reading that these are rough notes, written in the moment as I played the game. As such, later thoughts/opinions/observations might contradict those which came earlier, and some presumptions or guesses might have eventually turned out to be flat out incorrect.
Lastly: I currently have a broken collarbone (healing well!) and typing is difficult, so don’t expect prompt replies to comments on these notes. That, and I have already forgotten as much as I remember about the game.
... Mucho spoilers within…

Opens with that beautiful strings and keys, trademark Syberia music.

Opens in 1937, as Dana Roze, in Vaghen, Osterthal’s capital.

I remember playing first Syberia, the effect the introduction had on me. Tremendous. This is similarly tremendous.

Beautiful camera that turns to peek down alleys and around corners, granting visual access even to places you can’t physically go. This is a real place, you think.
I like pixel art and watercolors, but this makes me think ‘wow, we need more AAA adventure games.’

Models are beautiful and most facial expressions are excellent, but there are robot-like uncanny valleyisms that are sometimes detrimental to the cinematic nuance of the rest of the proceedings.

Skips to Kate Walker winter 2004, in a cell w Katyusha in a salt mine, been there for a year captured by militia

Neo/Nazi militia. Seems like the stakes are higher this time than in S1 and 2.

The fear of clicking to see/do something that will irrevocably progress the game and keep you from seeing or doing something else is bothersome because you WANT to see everything, every detail, the game is so beautiful and curiosity inducing.

Kate is not the same. Still strong, but with a sense of resignation and despondency that was never there before. Her growth and boundless confidence accumulated in 1 & 2 have clearly been drained by events since parting from Hans in Syberia at the end of Syberia 2. She is indeed, according to one character, ‘in danger of dying of grief.’

Details like a pencil rolling down from back to front of the drawer when you open it.

Discover a train that contains a Nazi officer, and a secret. What is it?

Early puzzles revolve around manipulating the interface. Not puzzles per se, just interactions. They are to help you acclimate to the interface?

You realize that the paintings looted by the brown shadow come from Dana’s home. Wonderful way to bring things full circle, or at least connect them, so early.

A little strange which small interactions the devs chose to make you do, and which they let happen in a cutscene. Turning keys, yes. What could have been a very satisfying punch to an enemy’s face, no.

Pause anytime is great. All games should do this.

After finding a picture of a girl who Katyusha swears looks exactly like her (Kate), Kate, lacking anything else to do, goes off to find out who this girl is. And the game picks up one year later, in Dana’s town.

Kate arrives in Vhagen and notices mechanical systems that she has seen before. Reminiscent of Syberia 1 and 2, when you could follow the trail of Hans Voralberg by finding his machines in the places you visited, where he left his creative mark.

Reading is not necessary, but you won’t grasp what’s going on unless you do it. And there’s a lot of it.

Might have had more impact if they had just used the word Nazi instead of Brown Shadow. If you’re going to mention WWII by name and talk about systematic death camp genocide, then it stands to reason that you can mention Nazis too.

Paintings that you observe in 1937 show up as antiques decorating homes in 2004. How cool is that? And it’s not shoved in your face; it’s subtle —unless you look at all the paintings, you’d miss it.

‘Instrospection’ command usually leads to exposition that is out of place with the otherwise stellar storytelling, but I can’t see how it could have been done better without just giving you a diary to read or a big block of ‘meanwhile…’ text.

Throughout the game you have access to a journal —but it’s not Kate’s journal. It belongs to Nic Cantin, the detective who was tracking her in Syberia 2 for her employers, before quitting his job and letting Kate go. He’s trying to find Kate again, but this time it’s for more virtuous personal reasons, and on behalf of her friends Olivia and Dan Foster (although Dan was her ex fiance who cheated on her with her best friend Olivia in Syberia 1).
He’s been tracking her for three years. His journal seems to be updated for us to read, always a step behind Kate, by a day or two. It’s fun that in his journal you can see the clues he’s gathered as to where Kate has been and what she’s been doing —before we’ve even done these things ourselves!

The small cutscenes triggered by minor interactions do a great job of giving the player a sense of what life is like in the various locations.

Playing with the Voralberg machines isn’t necessarily always challenging, but they are so cool that it’s always fun. Watch carefully as you do —the mechanistic details of everything being set in motion are a treat to behold.

Navigation can be a little bit of a bummer sometimes. The camera angles mostly work in favor of the game’s atmosphere and sense of place, but sometimes they work against navigation, causing you to miss areas entirely or make it difficult to find places you are looking for.

The quality and quantity of architecture created for the game is astonishing. You could take a screenshot at pretty much anytime and have something nice enough to print and hang on your wall.

Continued in next post.

By having Kate follow the mystery of the girl in the painting, the game gives an inspiring message, one that is consistent with the messages conveyed in the first two games, that we don’t need an absolute purposeful purpose in life. We just need a journey, even one that is deeply personal and meaningful only to us, to make it worthwhile.

As an avid hiker, I couldn’t help but be enthused by the exciting sense of impending beautiful discovery around every bend of the trail I was guiding Kate through.

One circle closes, another opens. You keep going back to 1937, even after you think that the flashbacking and forward were just a scene-setting prologue method.

As Kate, at the refuge, you discover a series of photographs, many of them corresponding to important events in her life —dob and beginning journey with Oscar in Syberia 1. What a mystery!

Navigation tip: Don’t click. Hold down left button

Some side objectives are very worthwhile and add a lot to flesh out the experience. Others are not nearly as rewarding,  hence disappointing.

Reference to the context of a lock box containing the information needed to open a lock box makes no sense. ‘Oooh, this might have the info I need to open the box I just opened!’

At a certain point in the game, you gain the ability to switch between characters and times 1937 and 2005. I wasn’t expecting this. Curious how it will affect the story direction.

There’s so much you don’t have to do, but are amply rewarded for doing. Looking at pictures is gratifying by itself, especially so when you discuss those pictures with other characters. Love seeing the changes in the areas (like the lodge) between ‘37 and ‘05.

What was once an artist’s loft photo studio in the attic is now just a derelict attic.

There’s really no explanation for how Kate knows that she is receiving messages from Dana 70 years in the past, and makes comments like ‘I can’t reach that room anymore…but Dana could.’. There is no big event leading up to this happening. It’s like Kate is the player and sees everything the player sees. Not gracefully introduced.

The scene where you play as Leni inside an old footage reel while the reel is being watched by Kate is very clever. Great idea.

And then we jump to New Jersey, in the winter of 1983. Playing as ‘Katie’ (Dana’s daughter, no, granddaughter?) Not sure why I didn’t see this coming.

Mystery revolves around a music box or ‘bird’ that Kate has loved since she was a girl.

Kate’s coldness in the first game is explained, which is nice.

I’m probably halfway through the game and still haven’t really played much. This is really a walking simulator+. Not much agency in where to go, only a couple of puzzles, which were on the easy side. I feel confined. Hope it opens up soon.

Within the first hour of gameplay, we see Kate traverse Europe on an antique motorbike on the run from an illegal slave trade organization. It’s a multi-year journey, and that’s the game/story I’d rather be playing.

So much dramatic downtime, watching Kate sit, too-long pauses in conversation. This is a 2 hour game in a 10 hour wrapper. How many times do I need to see a minute-long cutscene of Kate boarding a tram, sitting on the tram, departing the tram?

Standing around in a cafe chit chatting with the barista about local news is a far cry from the rapid adventuring of the previous two games.

In a story that tries hard for social realism, it’s strange to encounter a school rector who requests that you break the law in harmless but grandiloquent fashion before he’ll let you view some old documents.

So much redundancy between introspection and diary entries. Choose one, game devs.

Reminds me of Dreamfall, another game with a lot to recommend it by in terms of plot, but no real puzzles, just being funneled from place to place performing menial tasks.

The simplicity of your interactions with the machines is a missed opportunity and a disappointment. There should have been a hard mode.

Fundamental problem in storytelling: The game starts in interesting places with high stakes and becomes smaller and smaller, rather than escalating. From a mine in the middle of the Eastern European wilderness, surrounded by fascists, buried treasure, abandoned trains , and skeletons…to a town square, for the third time.

Doing stuff doesn’t equal figuring out puzzles.

But putting Oscar into the piano as a hamster in the wheel to power it is fun.

The truth takes an extraordinarily long time to dawn on Kate, especially considering how smart she is. We figure out the mystery ages before she does.

Turning off the clues makes it too easy to miss important story points that require doing unintuitive things to activate. Turning them on causes the game to be even more of a funneling walking simulator.

Like all good adventure game protagonists, Kate is willing to break the law in mostly harmless fashion when it suits her.

There is a scene where you have to climb into an attic from the outside of a building. Rather than let us figure out how to do this ourselves, the game makes us click on a single available hotspot, listen to Kate’s deductions, then click on a new single available hotspot, and listen to more deductions. This goes on for five clicks, before you can click on a drainpipe and get moving. What could have been a puzzle instead does the equivalent of holding our hands as we cross a street in a one horse town while the cross traffic light is red as part of a guided tour and there’s a crossing guard on duty. It’s that easy.

Continued…

Gameplay at this point reminds me of a hybrid of Olympic Games button mashers and Slater & Charlie Go Camping.

I enjoyed the plot twist toward the supernatural, and the casual 1940’s ‘anything is possible’ way it was dealt with. The obvious pregnancy plot twist…let’s see where that goes.

Little animations like the way fingers belonging to a distressed person slide off the window with a light, slow relief of pressure as she turns away. Lovely.

You really do feel sadness at the BIG plot twist (death of baby).

Whose idea was this cemetery maze, with its horrible camera angles and controls that I thought we left in the PS1 Resident Evil era, which we have to traverse multiple times for no good reason?

Controlling Oscar should be exciting. Instead, it’s brain dead boring. Hold down a button and watch him move.

Irrational, suicidal behavior from Kate on a matter that could be safely resolved the next day.

With all the awful flaws, there are some spine chilling moments, surprises, on par with the best.

Voice acting is sometimes good, sometimes very stilted, like lines were read without context.

Stupid late game motive given to a major character in order to make something happen in the story. Expected better, this felt cheap.

****

And that’s all I wrote! Rarely has my opinion of a game changed so drastically from initial impressions to final impressions. I’d write a lot more in summation but for the aforementioned collarbone injury. Maybe another time. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed.

Jdawg445 - 02 December 2023 07:50 AM

side note I don’t know how I feel about a review site refusing to publish your review simply because it doesn’t align with their opinion of it, seems kind of shady to me.

I understand their point: Syberia was a top 5 game of the year on their site and I was going to score it in the 40-60 range, I forgot exactly where. That might have caused confusion for their audience.

But while I understand, I also disagree.

A lack of time was the primary reason I stopped writing for them, but it was also due to feeling like I was sometimes wasting time to adhere to their system, or vision, which I thought was convoluted to the point of flaw. Also, notetaking and playing with a strong critical eye of appraisal diminished my enjoyment of playing certain games, which is ultimately why I play games. Then again, I enjoy writing too, so there might have been a positive balance, had I been writing within a more agreeable paradigm.

Well, I find it curious that the other site was supossedly open because of discrepancies in the editorial line of reviews here, too many stars for every game…

Anyway, welcome back to your deep and thoughful comments on games, Baron_Blubba.

Jack was fine with me giving games low scores. It was just the discrepency between my review and their previously published opinion that was deemed not suitable for print.
My scores were consistently lower than most other reviewers, mostly because I use the full scale and so to me a 60- 75% game is still worth playing.
This actually irked me more than it did Jack, who never mentioned it, because I personally think that if you have a team of reviewers, they should all be ascribing the same value to the numbers. But whereas to me a 75% score indicates a good and potentially very good game (for some players), for others anything between, say, 65% and 84% is damning with faint praise.
And this is a problem that exists on many review sites for many different types of products.

Jdawg445 - 02 December 2023 02:14 PM

The only thing I actually disagree with you on was the side content, I thought it was almost sign posted too much; like having a neon sign blinking for you to look here

Most of the side content was extremely well signposted. My problem was that it is sometimes unclear where the cut-off point is to access this content. Early in the game you are being rushed to a certain area and it would make no sense to detour when, according to the plot, time is against you —don’t you dare be late! Yet unless the player defies the in-game logical imperative to hurry, they will miss a side-scene which, while not crucial, is very enjoyable and adds significant flesh to the early stages of scene-setting plot development.
And sometimes I didn’t realize which of several paths would lead to irrevocable progress and which was the bonus sidequest path. Got better at figuring that out after a few hours, if I recall.