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Syberia
2 (2004)
In
2002, French artist and game designer Benoit Sokal
released Syberia,
the follow-up to his wonderful yet largely ignored game Amerzone.
Not since Myst
has there been a game that has so polarized the adventure gaming
community. Several gaming
websites and publications lauded Syberia
as the Game of the Year. It
became one of the top selling adventure games of the last decade.
Legions of near-rabid fans sprung up, attracted by Syberia’s
stunning artwork and (to their mind) moving storytelling.
An equally adamant cadre of detractors appeared, citing the
game’s lack of interactivity, ease and scarcity of puzzles and its
brevity. Given
the strong feelings on both sides of the fence, Sokal’s
sequel is unlikely to change many minds.
Syberia
2 mostly offers more of the same.
In some ways, it is an improvement on its predecessor, and in
others it suffers by comparison. While
addressing most of the shortcomings the harsher critics found in Syberia,
the sequel also sacrifices some of the emotional storytelling that won the
hearts of many fans. Previously
on Syberia… Unlike
most game sequels, Syberia
2 picks up almost exactly where the first game left off.
This would normally be a detriment, virtually requiring that the
player have purchased and played the original game before jumping into the
sequel. Microids
included a clever way around this potential problem.
On the main menu, there is an option to see a cinematic recap of
the events of Syberia,
assuring that no player is left in the dark.
And given that it is unlikely that anyone reading this review
isn’t familiar with the story of the first game, I’m not going to get
into it here. However,
I felt a disturbing bit of discontinuity despite this attempt to merge the
two games seamlessly. Hans Voralberg,
whom we met only momentarily at the conclusion of Syberia,
quickly turns out to be absolutely nothing like the person we had
described to us in the first game. When Kate Walker (our heroine) dug into
the Voralberg family history in S1, Hans was
portrayed as a kind of idiot savant, brain damaged during a childhood
fall. Despite being a
mechanical genius, Han’s disability was so severe that his father
eventually faked Hans’s death and secretly sent him away rather than
live with the social stigma. But
when we finally get to talk to Hans aboard his marvelous clockwork train
at the beginning of S2, we discover that while Hans may be a bit of a
dreamer, he is perfectly lucid, intelligent and functional.
In fact, his only disability (other than extreme old age) seems to
be that he is unusually short! While
this new image of Hans in no way detracts from the self-contained game of Syberia
2 it certainly does not make sense if the player (as Sokal
so obviously wants us to do) considers the two games to be telling a
single continuous story. “Thar’s
puzzles in that thar game!” As
I mentioned before, most of the criticism that S1 received bashed it for
the lack of interactivity and the ease and scarcity of its puzzles.
Don’t expect any improvements in the interactivity department
from S2. Once again, we are
treated to screen after screen after screen of absolutely gorgeous
artwork… which contain absolutely nothing to click on or interact with.
Similarly, Kate can only talk to a fraction of the people she sees
during her travels. It is
easy to get lulled by all the empty screens, which makes it all the more
frustrating when you encounter one of the few obscenely non-intuitive bits
of pixel hunting that are required. (I
defy anyone to find the slingshot strap on their first couple of trips
through the appropriate screen.) As
in S1, we also sometimes get teased with hotspots which net us no return.
Early in the game, Kate visits a monastery.
The cursor indicates that we can examine/talk to many of the monks
we see wandering about, but any attempt to do so results in total silence.
On the other hand, at least we are spared the annoying mantra of
“No need to go down there” this time around. The
puzzles, however, mark the most dramatic improvement of Syberia
2 over the original. One
would expect that a game that centers on the exploits of a genius in the
design of clockwork machinery and automata to be chock-full of clever
mechanical puzzles. S2 is no Riven,
but it certainly succeeds to a far greater degree than its predecessor.
Not only are the puzzles reasonably challenging, they are also
logical (with a couple of exceptions) and almost universally well
integrated into their various contexts. There
are a couple of puzzles that seem a bit farfetched or are downright
clunkers (the bird-obsessed monk, defacing art with a scrub brush and
obtaining Laughing Tree berries come to mind) but the majority of the
puzzling was exactly what I was expecting and then denied when I purchased
the original Syberia. This
increase in the number of puzzles also leads to S2 being significantly
longer than S1, if still short by the standards of most adventure game
“classics.” The game is
also “artificially” lengthened by a combination of extreme linearity,
being dialogue driven for the first half of the game, and forced marching
to and fro to accomplish tasks. For
instance, when trying to get into the above-mentioned monastery, Kate must
first attempt (unsuccessfully) to enter the monastery on her own before
returning to town and discovering that she can now
discuss getting access to the monastery with some of the townsfolk.
Even after that, Kate eventually finds that she must fetch an item
that requires a journey of fourteen
screens each way before she finally gains admittance to the monastery.
Given that even Kate’s running speed isn’t particularly fast,
such forced back-and-forth trudging actually accounts for a significant
portion of the total time spent playing Syberia
2. It’s
the story… of a lovely lady… Despite
its greater length, there is also simply less actual plot
in Syberia
2. The great majority of
what story there is takes place in the village where the game starts.
There are fewer stops for the train, fewer people to meet and fewer
adventures than in S1. What
there is, though, is a
side-story about how the law firm for which Kate works has sent a private
detective on her trail to bring her back to the States.
This side-plot has absolutely no bearing on Kate and Hans’s
journey and serves zero literary purpose, acting purely as an occasional
interruption of the primary narrative stream.
Furthermore, these interruptions are all essentially identical and
quickly become repetitive and tiresome. On
the plus side, I found C3PO… errr… Oscar
less annoying this time around.
However, in one huge
gaffe, Oscar does something that is 100% contrary to his entire character
and programming in order to provide one of the major plot points.
I won’t give it away, but when you play Syberia
2, think back to everything Kate had to go through in order to get
Oscar to take her anywhere on the train.
Then consider how likely it is that Oscar would take other people
who have no tickets anywhere at
all. All’s
well that ends well Much
of your reaction to Syberia
2 will depend not only on whether you liked S1, but also specifically
what you did or didn’t like about it.
The graphics and sound are, if anything, even more
wondrous this time around, making S2 one of the most beautiful games of
any genre ever produced. The
challenge has definitely been upped, while the personal nature of the
story has disappeared. It is
certainly longer than S1, but much of the length has been added
artificially and is a result of forced trudging around through lots and
lots of non-interactive screens. Personally,
I found the improvements over the original to outweigh the flaws and
completed Syberia
2 feeling satisfied that this
time I’d got what I paid for.
Final Grade: 8 out of 10 |