The adventure game genre is an odd one to examine. Imagine a product where traditional gameplay is deemphasized. You won’t be engaging in any tense shootouts, thrilling car chases, or other forms of high-flying spectacle. Instead, you’ll be presented with modest environments, in which you’ll need to examine documents, gather items, and solve puzzles.
Sounds fun? Well, not to most people. Point-and-click experiences were a staple of the PC ecosystem in gaming’s earlier years, but have since faded into obscurity. Adventure games have salvaged some success on consoles, mostly due to their willingness to become (somewhat) more interactive, with Telltale’s catalogue of choice-based titles briefly taking over the industry before their quality fell off.
Remastering Syberia for consoles is certainly a surprising move then. The lack of demand for titles in the genre coupled with aged 2002 game design philosophy doesn’t inspire confidence in today’s ultra-competitive market. Indeed, I’d guess Virtuallyz Gaming’s efforts will likely only be appreciated by those already fans of Benoît Sokal’s clockpunk odyssey.
Let’s start with the good; the visual facelift Valadilène and other areas have received looks nice. Textures are well-detailed, resolution is sharp, and the redone lighting breathes life into the environments. Performance is also rock solid, though any serious dips would have been a major cause for alarm given the game’s lack of dynamism.
Character models leave a bit more to be desired. Automatons fare well, but humans resemble plastic dolls. They aren’t awful, but stick out like a sore thumb given that the locations they’re placed in appear so lifelike. It feels like they’re from an older hardware generation, while other assets are in line with modern standards.
Exploration and solving puzzles makes up the majority of your playtime with Syberia. You’ll navigate protagonist Kate Walker around various spaces, reading text, searching for clues, and collecting items. Things get a little tricky however when it comes to actually interacting with the environment. The game makes use of fixed camera angles, which lends a bit of filmic charm, but also obscures the player’s vision to an extent. At multiple points, I had to look up a walkthrough to determine how to progress, only to find out there was a door or item I could engage with hidden just out of view.
Once you wrap your head around your surroundings, you’ll actually need to solve the puzzles the game is presenting you with. This is certainly one of those earlier titles that oldheads love to talk about, “back when games didn’t hold your hand as much”, etc. Yes, Syberia expects a lot more of the player than modern titles, but we’re so far removed from where the industry was in 2002 that members of the contemporary audience may not possess the acumen to divine the answers.
It’s frustrating, because I struggle to put my finger on specific elements of Syberia and definitively say “this is bad”. There are some good puzzles, but they’re laid out in such a way that is completely foreign to today’s gamers. It feels akin to struggling with a different language, or having to learn basic elements of video game literacy all over again. Syberia is caked with the design fingerprints of a bygone era, but it’s one that I struggle to see people connect with 2025.
The story and concepts of Benoît Sokal’s world are interesting and I’d love to explore them more, but the game structure actively grinds story progress to a halt. You’re constantly being stopped by new puzzles, which some may love, but it certainly destroys the pacing for those looking to find out what happens next. When you are treated to a cutscene, they’re the original videos from 2002. It’s quite disappointing these couldn’t be recreated in the new engine, considering the wide gap in visuals between the two eras.
Syberia isn’t going to be for everyone, and it likely won’t be for you. Point-and-click games aren’t very relevant these days for a reason, and it’s largely because the industry has moved towards more player-friendly experiences. This remaster is a great opportunity to experience a bit of the past, but I doubt it will have many people reminiscing about the way things used to be.
