Mechanically not perfect, and massive story-downgrade.
saddest mid of my life...
Syberia fue la saga que me introdujo en las aventuras gráficas. Esta tercera entrega, no obstante, y a pesar de tener buenas intenciones, no está a la altura de su nombre, más por falta de trabajo en algunos parámetros jugables que por lo que es el juego en sí.
A disappointing third title.
❤ :
- A beautiful soundtrack made by Inon Zur.
- Some interesting puzzles.
💔 :
- Confusing mechanics and camera, especially with the controller.
- The franchise missing it's soul and Sokal's touch.
- Horrendous dubbing.
- Cliché characters with no depth.
❤ :
- A beautiful soundtrack made by Inon Zur.
- Some interesting puzzles.
💔 :
- Confusing mechanics and camera, especially with the controller.
- The franchise missing it's soul and Sokal's touch.
- Horrendous dubbing.
- Cliché characters with no depth.
I’ve had a good time playing this game but it has some technical problems and some other aspects aren’t as good as the previous games. The problems include the game running sluggish, being a bit buggy and crashing twice on me. The crashes aren’t too bad since the game auto saves. As for the bugs, all of them are not game breaking but one was annoying because I had to reload my save to display an object I could interact with for the puzzle. Also it is not always clear which parts you can interact with or important spots/objects you can miss due to the way the camera works. But this only happened with me a few times (3 or 4 at most). Anyway, I enjoyed the puzzles, Kate’s journey and the atmosphere. If you’re a big fan of Syberia, then you’re ought to play it. But do lower your expectations and get it on sale.
Actually, I understand if you played the first two parts of Syberia on PC, you will be as much disappointed with the controls as I've been with Monkey Island 4. Playing on Switch though, I've just been asking why the heck they made stick controls worse than they had been. After all, I got used to the gameplay as it was and now, adapting sort of twin stick controls with the right camera stick also working to chose between hotspots didn't make it better for me.
Doing some reading, some problems got patched on PC, on Nintendo Switch however they didn't. Be patient through my rant, it wasn't just bad, but whilst I often ran without orientation to find the missing link to solve the puzzle, that actually caused problems as if the game expects you to stay within limits that are not defined. It means I often had to reboot an older savestat just cause I wasn't able to open the inventory on hotspots where I should have and when I returned to solve the puzzle straight without any further exploring it worked. One time, in front of the mayor's house, when the hospital train was still in, I couldn't leave the fountain area anymore. Seems I went there too early before my mission. When interacting with a bird, the game crashed with me remaining in first person, not able to do anything. I also had a black screen twice, one time followed by the question, if I'd like to report the problem to Nintendo, which I did.
That's still not even all of it. But the clipping of 3D models, having them cut in half by background objects or perspectives enabling you to look inside the protagonist like an empty barrel is what I'd call minor flaws in Syberia 3. Loading time and no way to skip dialogue? Live with it.
You can get sort of used to handling all that with lots of patience and tolerance. To the fact someone thought clicking ain't enough, leading to the player having to twist and turn lots of items with the analog stick, even though it's completely unnatural movement. To be honest, I often had to return, cause I forgot I could have pulled, twisted or opened something.
But I also enjoyed some of it, like loading a ferry with a crane, even though camera sight was almost none existent. In a way, it might have been a very special challenge combined with a sequel to games I actually never liked for their controls, but for their atmosphere.
Yes, even voice acting ain't perfect in Syberia 3. It's not the most creative idea to wake up in a hospital either, though this one has some special agenda with some old Soviet comrades behind it, it seems. It's also easier for us to escape than our friend with one leg missing.
Having no idea where those ostriches had been in the story before, I still enjoyed the design overall again, even if the product barely could match the technical level of the average PS3 game. It works out more of the bad guy duality from the first game with the filthy capitalist American on our back and the stereotype Russian enemy. Kate had to face a little misogyny before, but now it's also racism/elitism against an old tribe and polluted environment addressed. If you can live with the randomness of the story, it's actually not all that bad, I mean it kept me going after all, except from I had to play my money's worth out of Syberia 3 (paid almost 5€).
Seems it wasn't just me enjoying having to play another character in one scene, so a bonus scene let's you return to that constellation, filling some blanks from the game that weren't necessary to it, I've got to admit. There's some recycling to it, so it's really just some extra perspective that would have been too long in the actual game.
Syberia 3, if it did something right, taught me a lesson in remaining calm. If it wasn't for the revisit of familiar characters, I don't know if I would have sat through some of the most frustrating flaws ever witnessed in a game, not only on the Nintendo Switch. It definitely needs to be patched big time.
But at times when shows like 13 Reasons Why or Cobra Kai get schematically netflixed in later seasons, Syberia 3 still appears to be one of the better sequel stories after all. And since the series was never my favourite technically, it still somehow worked out, even though I'll never touch it again. I always wanted to know what happens next until the end. That is... something?
Would you like to read more of my backloggd adventure reviews?
Syberia
Syberia II
Whispers of a Machine
Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure
Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure
Doing some reading, some problems got patched on PC, on Nintendo Switch however they didn't. Be patient through my rant, it wasn't just bad, but whilst I often ran without orientation to find the missing link to solve the puzzle, that actually caused problems as if the game expects you to stay within limits that are not defined. It means I often had to reboot an older savestat just cause I wasn't able to open the inventory on hotspots where I should have and when I returned to solve the puzzle straight without any further exploring it worked. One time, in front of the mayor's house, when the hospital train was still in, I couldn't leave the fountain area anymore. Seems I went there too early before my mission. When interacting with a bird, the game crashed with me remaining in first person, not able to do anything. I also had a black screen twice, one time followed by the question, if I'd like to report the problem to Nintendo, which I did.
That's still not even all of it. But the clipping of 3D models, having them cut in half by background objects or perspectives enabling you to look inside the protagonist like an empty barrel is what I'd call minor flaws in Syberia 3. Loading time and no way to skip dialogue? Live with it.
You can get sort of used to handling all that with lots of patience and tolerance. To the fact someone thought clicking ain't enough, leading to the player having to twist and turn lots of items with the analog stick, even though it's completely unnatural movement. To be honest, I often had to return, cause I forgot I could have pulled, twisted or opened something.
But I also enjoyed some of it, like loading a ferry with a crane, even though camera sight was almost none existent. In a way, it might have been a very special challenge combined with a sequel to games I actually never liked for their controls, but for their atmosphere.
Yes, even voice acting ain't perfect in Syberia 3. It's not the most creative idea to wake up in a hospital either, though this one has some special agenda with some old Soviet comrades behind it, it seems. It's also easier for us to escape than our friend with one leg missing.
Having no idea where those ostriches had been in the story before, I still enjoyed the design overall again, even if the product barely could match the technical level of the average PS3 game. It works out more of the bad guy duality from the first game with the filthy capitalist American on our back and the stereotype Russian enemy. Kate had to face a little misogyny before, but now it's also racism/elitism against an old tribe and polluted environment addressed. If you can live with the randomness of the story, it's actually not all that bad, I mean it kept me going after all, except from I had to play my money's worth out of Syberia 3 (paid almost 5€).
Seems it wasn't just me enjoying having to play another character in one scene, so a bonus scene let's you return to that constellation, filling some blanks from the game that weren't necessary to it, I've got to admit. There's some recycling to it, so it's really just some extra perspective that would have been too long in the actual game.
Syberia 3, if it did something right, taught me a lesson in remaining calm. If it wasn't for the revisit of familiar characters, I don't know if I would have sat through some of the most frustrating flaws ever witnessed in a game, not only on the Nintendo Switch. It definitely needs to be patched big time.
But at times when shows like 13 Reasons Why or Cobra Kai get schematically netflixed in later seasons, Syberia 3 still appears to be one of the better sequel stories after all. And since the series was never my favourite technically, it still somehow worked out, even though I'll never touch it again. I always wanted to know what happens next until the end. That is... something?
Would you like to read more of my backloggd adventure reviews?
Syberia
Syberia II
Whispers of a Machine
Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure
Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure
Syberia 3 is a huge disappointment: bad controls, bad interface, bad camera, bad voice acting, obtuse puzzle design and a frustrating cliffhanger ending bring down the third chapter of a classic trilogy.
-----
I've been a fan of Syberia ever since the first one back in 2002, and while the sequel wasn't as good, I was excited to see a third one happen thirteen years after the fact. Unfortunately the shift to the third dimension hasn't done Kate Walker's story any favors: the classic point&click interface has been replaced with a control scheme designed around a controller; you can still play the game with just a mouse, but it’s painfully obvious from the start that it’s not the ideal way to do so: something as simple as pointing and clicking on an interactive object has become clunky, especially if two or more objects are grouped nearby and you need to highlight a specific one, which is extremely frequent. Kate’s pathfinding is also not great, and you’ll often have to click multiple times to find the spot where the camera decides to move and let you see the rest of the area.
Play with a controller then? Well, yes... and no. While this makes navigating the environment much easier (left stick to move and R2 to run), interacting with it is just as difficult: you use the right analog stick to pan the camera around, which targets whichever interactive hotspot is closest to the center of the screen or, in screens with a fixed camera, cycles between objects, only that’s extremely temperamental, leading to a lot of frustration. There are times when the right stick controls both the rotation of the camera around an object, for example a complex piece of machinery that has to be interacted with from all angles, and the selection of interactive spots on it, meaning you will have to fiddle with the camera until you manage to select the one you need. Considering that some puzzles give you a dozen buttons and levers to press and pull, and sometimes I would swear there was no way to get the analog stick to select a certain item, you can see how that would quickly become an aggravation. The result is that you get the feeling that none of the control schemes have been optimized and you end up having to switch between controller and mouse, which should never happen in any game. There is also an annoying slowness to everything: the panning of the camera, scrolling the menus to select objects, turning pages in the documents you need to consult for puzzle solutions, or even simply slowly strolling around certain huge areas with nothing in them to do, it’s just a slog.
Then there are the precision puzzles and oh boy… that’s when things really go south. There are multiple of these, in which you are expected to use the analog stick to precisely control a rotating dial or valve, holding it at a very specific angle, which is not very responsive; good on paper but poor in execution, which adds a whole new layer of frustration due to the game not responding to your commands while you are trying to figure out the solution to a puzzle that wasn’t that intuitive to start with. Even something simple like turning a key in its slot has been mapped to analog input, and no, it often doesn’t work well either. It does not help that the puzzle design is obtuse, and I say this knowing very well that Syberia belongs to that particular school of early-2000s French adventure games with intentionally complicated Myst-style puzzles; no, here the puzzles range from absolutely inscrutable (a waterfall you have to purify with barely any visual feedback) to random (fiddling with a gear stick to keep a gauge in the green and winning not knowing how) to busywork (obvious solution but a long boring series of passages and unskippable animations to achieve it). There is also quite a bit of pixel hunting: it’s easy to miss certain poorly visible key items, expecially if you choose the controller scheme, or because they were just off to the right in a static puzzle screen and nothing indicated that you had to pan the camera to see them. As a result, be ready to make multiple slow-jog passes through the areas of the game hoping to chance by the item you’ve missed because the camera was a wide shot or simply didn’t focus on it. On top of that, you often get the feeling of finding the solution before the problem, doing something whose purpose is unclear because the game hasn’t presented you with the related roadblock yet. Here’s how good puzzle design works: first show me a locked door, then give me a key. Never the other way around.
So the gameplay and puzzles are not the greatest, but you can forgive a lot to a game if the story is good and the characters are relatable. Unfortunately Syberia 3 stumbles even on that front: while Kate Walker and her friends are generally fairly well written, animated and voiced (the original cast reprise their roles in this), the new side characters are definitely not. It is very common to hear a voice that completely mismatches the character, for example a sour middle-aged Russian doctor has been given a young, almost sensual voice that’s entirely jarring, or a large elderly matron or an elderly man sound like they are in their twenties. Other characters sound like they were voiced by members of the development team reading lines in a language that’s not their native one, rather than professional actors. This effect is somewhat mitigated as the game progresses and the only characters you interact with are the main ones, but it is extremeley noticeable early on when the areas are more populated. The music is absolutely fantastic though, definitely the high point of the game: Inon Zur of Syberia 2, Dragon Age and Fallout fame delivers an amazing score that is very likely to end up in your playlist. On the other hand the game is nothing more than visually adequate: textures and animations are passable, it looks like a game from ten years ago, but that is to be expected for a relatively low budget production. It runs in Unity and that allows for some pretty good lighting here and there.
The story is mostly good, somewhat less charming than the original Syberia, but at the very least on par with the second. Kate Walker is always likable and the plot hints at trouble brewing for her, which sadly ends up unresolved, and that’s because of one glaring problem: without spoiling anything, the game ends in a shameful cliffhanger that not so much teases, rather shouts a sequel that I see as very unlikely to happen considering the poor reception the game had. I simply do not understand why game developers decide to not conclude a story when they barely manage to have a third game funded after over a decade of radio silence. Isn’t a good satisfying ending better than a cliffhanger for a sequel that will never be made? There is also a single piece of DLC, which you would think would be a conclusion to the story, but isn’t. In fact half of it are recycled cutscenes from the base game (and from the DLC itself!) and it is so short and barely interactive that it’s downright insulting. It doesn’t even contain a single puzzle.
At the end of it all, Syberia 3 hurts, it hurts that a much beloved series like this couldn’t get the sendoff that it deserved, both because of the quality of the game itself and because they decided to not conclude the story. As it is, I cannot recommend it to anyone other than the most hardcore Syberia or adventure game fans. If ever a Syberia 4 happens, and I hope it does, it has to deliver a more polished product than this.
-----
I've been a fan of Syberia ever since the first one back in 2002, and while the sequel wasn't as good, I was excited to see a third one happen thirteen years after the fact. Unfortunately the shift to the third dimension hasn't done Kate Walker's story any favors: the classic point&click interface has been replaced with a control scheme designed around a controller; you can still play the game with just a mouse, but it’s painfully obvious from the start that it’s not the ideal way to do so: something as simple as pointing and clicking on an interactive object has become clunky, especially if two or more objects are grouped nearby and you need to highlight a specific one, which is extremely frequent. Kate’s pathfinding is also not great, and you’ll often have to click multiple times to find the spot where the camera decides to move and let you see the rest of the area.
Play with a controller then? Well, yes... and no. While this makes navigating the environment much easier (left stick to move and R2 to run), interacting with it is just as difficult: you use the right analog stick to pan the camera around, which targets whichever interactive hotspot is closest to the center of the screen or, in screens with a fixed camera, cycles between objects, only that’s extremely temperamental, leading to a lot of frustration. There are times when the right stick controls both the rotation of the camera around an object, for example a complex piece of machinery that has to be interacted with from all angles, and the selection of interactive spots on it, meaning you will have to fiddle with the camera until you manage to select the one you need. Considering that some puzzles give you a dozen buttons and levers to press and pull, and sometimes I would swear there was no way to get the analog stick to select a certain item, you can see how that would quickly become an aggravation. The result is that you get the feeling that none of the control schemes have been optimized and you end up having to switch between controller and mouse, which should never happen in any game. There is also an annoying slowness to everything: the panning of the camera, scrolling the menus to select objects, turning pages in the documents you need to consult for puzzle solutions, or even simply slowly strolling around certain huge areas with nothing in them to do, it’s just a slog.
Then there are the precision puzzles and oh boy… that’s when things really go south. There are multiple of these, in which you are expected to use the analog stick to precisely control a rotating dial or valve, holding it at a very specific angle, which is not very responsive; good on paper but poor in execution, which adds a whole new layer of frustration due to the game not responding to your commands while you are trying to figure out the solution to a puzzle that wasn’t that intuitive to start with. Even something simple like turning a key in its slot has been mapped to analog input, and no, it often doesn’t work well either. It does not help that the puzzle design is obtuse, and I say this knowing very well that Syberia belongs to that particular school of early-2000s French adventure games with intentionally complicated Myst-style puzzles; no, here the puzzles range from absolutely inscrutable (a waterfall you have to purify with barely any visual feedback) to random (fiddling with a gear stick to keep a gauge in the green and winning not knowing how) to busywork (obvious solution but a long boring series of passages and unskippable animations to achieve it). There is also quite a bit of pixel hunting: it’s easy to miss certain poorly visible key items, expecially if you choose the controller scheme, or because they were just off to the right in a static puzzle screen and nothing indicated that you had to pan the camera to see them. As a result, be ready to make multiple slow-jog passes through the areas of the game hoping to chance by the item you’ve missed because the camera was a wide shot or simply didn’t focus on it. On top of that, you often get the feeling of finding the solution before the problem, doing something whose purpose is unclear because the game hasn’t presented you with the related roadblock yet. Here’s how good puzzle design works: first show me a locked door, then give me a key. Never the other way around.
So the gameplay and puzzles are not the greatest, but you can forgive a lot to a game if the story is good and the characters are relatable. Unfortunately Syberia 3 stumbles even on that front: while Kate Walker and her friends are generally fairly well written, animated and voiced (the original cast reprise their roles in this), the new side characters are definitely not. It is very common to hear a voice that completely mismatches the character, for example a sour middle-aged Russian doctor has been given a young, almost sensual voice that’s entirely jarring, or a large elderly matron or an elderly man sound like they are in their twenties. Other characters sound like they were voiced by members of the development team reading lines in a language that’s not their native one, rather than professional actors. This effect is somewhat mitigated as the game progresses and the only characters you interact with are the main ones, but it is extremeley noticeable early on when the areas are more populated. The music is absolutely fantastic though, definitely the high point of the game: Inon Zur of Syberia 2, Dragon Age and Fallout fame delivers an amazing score that is very likely to end up in your playlist. On the other hand the game is nothing more than visually adequate: textures and animations are passable, it looks like a game from ten years ago, but that is to be expected for a relatively low budget production. It runs in Unity and that allows for some pretty good lighting here and there.
The story is mostly good, somewhat less charming than the original Syberia, but at the very least on par with the second. Kate Walker is always likable and the plot hints at trouble brewing for her, which sadly ends up unresolved, and that’s because of one glaring problem: without spoiling anything, the game ends in a shameful cliffhanger that not so much teases, rather shouts a sequel that I see as very unlikely to happen considering the poor reception the game had. I simply do not understand why game developers decide to not conclude a story when they barely manage to have a third game funded after over a decade of radio silence. Isn’t a good satisfying ending better than a cliffhanger for a sequel that will never be made? There is also a single piece of DLC, which you would think would be a conclusion to the story, but isn’t. In fact half of it are recycled cutscenes from the base game (and from the DLC itself!) and it is so short and barely interactive that it’s downright insulting. It doesn’t even contain a single puzzle.
At the end of it all, Syberia 3 hurts, it hurts that a much beloved series like this couldn’t get the sendoff that it deserved, both because of the quality of the game itself and because they decided to not conclude the story. As it is, I cannot recommend it to anyone other than the most hardcore Syberia or adventure game fans. If ever a Syberia 4 happens, and I hope it does, it has to deliver a more polished product than this.
This review contains spoilers
très sympa, mais le nombre de dialooooogues aled, laissez nous passer les dialogues svp c'est infernal
et de + les commandes chaotiques, genre horrible a jouer malheureusement, ça casse de fou le rythme et tout, t'es là tu pètes ton crâne parce que les commandes n'ont aucun sens mais bon,
il reste sympa
par contre la fin ??? pas de générique, cinématique trop nulle, Oscar qui recrève pour rien du tout et Kate qui finit par se faire kidnapper de manière trop pourri aussi, bon, autant ne pas faire de jeu si c'est pour bâcler la fin comme ça.
et de + les commandes chaotiques, genre horrible a jouer malheureusement, ça casse de fou le rythme et tout, t'es là tu pètes ton crâne parce que les commandes n'ont aucun sens mais bon,
il reste sympa
par contre la fin ??? pas de générique, cinématique trop nulle, Oscar qui recrève pour rien du tout et Kate qui finit par se faire kidnapper de manière trop pourri aussi, bon, autant ne pas faire de jeu si c'est pour bâcler la fin comme ça.
Dated Interactive Adventure.
Story: straightforward, yet directionless at the same time. Every section has its premise and conclusion. However, the transition between them is not well established. Moving forward feels like a compulsory task.
Characters: They are well crafted. They are relatable: players are able to identify with their personality and finally empathise, espacially in the beginning hours. The same can not be said about a certain antagonist, whose goals and motivations do not feel sensible at any point.
Gameplay: dated. As an interactive adventure, core gameplay mechanics fail to impress. It definetly is an Interactive experience, yet wether it is an adventure or not is quite rather questionable.
Story: straightforward, yet directionless at the same time. Every section has its premise and conclusion. However, the transition between them is not well established. Moving forward feels like a compulsory task.
Characters: They are well crafted. They are relatable: players are able to identify with their personality and finally empathise, espacially in the beginning hours. The same can not be said about a certain antagonist, whose goals and motivations do not feel sensible at any point.
Gameplay: dated. As an interactive adventure, core gameplay mechanics fail to impress. It definetly is an Interactive experience, yet wether it is an adventure or not is quite rather questionable.
Janky af controls
Really sad to see the franchise go down in quality after the fairly good upgrade 2 was for the series.
The technical aspects are what kills this for me and for most that played/will play this. Movement is so janky, you consistently have to fight the controls to do what you are supposed to do, I had to restart the game at least 3 times because it would randomly get stuck.
Voice acting was overall really bad, kate and oscar do a very good job as always but the supporting cast had either really bad actor choices that didn't fit with the character or just didn't know what they were doing.
Those unfortunately tarnish what would otherwise be a very good experience. The story doesn't hit as hard as 2 but it has some nice beats, puzzles are fairly enjoyable and you don't get stuck or have to waste time nearly as much as in previous entries. The soundtrack is as always really well done.
Wasted opportunity, if you REALLY like the Syberia series then you probably shouldn't skip this one but otherwise, I can't recommend this in good conscience.
The technical aspects are what kills this for me and for most that played/will play this. Movement is so janky, you consistently have to fight the controls to do what you are supposed to do, I had to restart the game at least 3 times because it would randomly get stuck.
Voice acting was overall really bad, kate and oscar do a very good job as always but the supporting cast had either really bad actor choices that didn't fit with the character or just didn't know what they were doing.
Those unfortunately tarnish what would otherwise be a very good experience. The story doesn't hit as hard as 2 but it has some nice beats, puzzles are fairly enjoyable and you don't get stuck or have to waste time nearly as much as in previous entries. The soundtrack is as always really well done.
Wasted opportunity, if you REALLY like the Syberia series then you probably shouldn't skip this one but otherwise, I can't recommend this in good conscience.
Mientras que los dos primeros juegos me encantaron, este me ha decepcionado.
A nivel gráfico, la sensación es que es más antiguo de lo que es, casi de la época de los primeros. Y a esto tengo que añadirle la torpe jugabilidad en consola.
A nivel gráfico, la sensación es que es más antiguo de lo que es, casi de la época de los primeros. Y a esto tengo que añadirle la torpe jugabilidad en consola.
50/100
As a huge point'n'click adventure fan, and someone who absolutely loved the first two parts, it almost hurts that I have to write this, but I'm afraid I can't recommend this game to anyone...
Kate Walker is still one of my favourite adventure game heroines, even this game couldn't change that, and I could overlook even the crazy amount of bugs and the atrocious voice acting. However, besides Kate and maybe Oscar, I couldn't care less about the rest of the characters. I mean, I've just finished the game, but I swear I can't remember the names of the main villain (who, by the way, was one of the most cliché, generic villains ever...) or of any of the youkols for the life of me.
Another issue for me was navigating through unnecessarily large but mostly empty environments using a strange control scheme that took quite some time to get used to. Most of my gameplay time went into trying to find the next location where I'm supposed to do something, then going back to the previous one, without getting lost in the meantime.
All in all, a colossal disappointment.
Kate Walker is still one of my favourite adventure game heroines, even this game couldn't change that, and I could overlook even the crazy amount of bugs and the atrocious voice acting. However, besides Kate and maybe Oscar, I couldn't care less about the rest of the characters. I mean, I've just finished the game, but I swear I can't remember the names of the main villain (who, by the way, was one of the most cliché, generic villains ever...) or of any of the youkols for the life of me.
Another issue for me was navigating through unnecessarily large but mostly empty environments using a strange control scheme that took quite some time to get used to. Most of my gameplay time went into trying to find the next location where I'm supposed to do something, then going back to the previous one, without getting lost in the meantime.
All in all, a colossal disappointment.