Syberia II Review

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Syberia II

Review by JenApril 2004

I regard Syberia as a minor cultural phenomenon, the culture in question, of course, being the adventure gaming world. It was released to almost universal critical accolade and very well received by the adventure-playing public. At first. But then there was a groundswell against it—the buzz turned negative, the game’s flaws being magnified all out of proportion and completely overshadowing what was right about it.  Puzzle-lovers reviled it for its easy conundrums, exploration-lovers despised its many doors that would not open … even the eye-candy lovers found bones to pick—the environments were too sterile, lifeless; pretty pictures do not a good game make. Perhaps it is a token of the broader human condition, this business of it being easier to find fault with a thing than to praise it. I’m certainly guilty of that myself from time to time.

Whatever the case, I was one of those swept off my feet by the first Syberia. For that I make no apology; my fond opinion stands to this day. All of the contrarians have had their effect on me, though. Throughout its development, I have looked at Syberia II with a jaundiced eye.

In between Syberia the first and this new Syberia II, I took up computer role-playing games. I have never understood why anybody thinks linearity in video games is a bad thing; I like knowing where I’m going and what I’m doing and that the game will actually come to an end one day. In CRPGs, though, even if they are wholly linear, you generally can find other things to do aside from working on the main task, and you can do these branching quests out of order. Adventure games don’t offer this; usually there is only the one story/puzzle path and if you’re stuck, you’re stuck—you can’t go do something else while you mull over the solution. I thought I would miss this multiplicity of missions in going from RPG back to adventure.

I needn’t have worried about any of this. Syberia II is every bit as enchanting as its predecessor—the wind- and snow-swept wintry surroundings, the absolute mastery of the medium displayed in the drawings, the artful camera angles, the grandiose music …  all conspired to carry me off to a different world every time I played.

Puzzles are well-integrated, although some are fairly preposterous.  For example, there is a time where Kate has to awaken a character who is visible but out of earshot for whatever reason—the particular puzzle involved is very convoluted with multiple steps and leaps of logic required to reach the goal, and meanwhile there is a whole pile of rocks practically under Kate’s arm—in real life, she probably would’ve just picked up and chucked one or two of them at the guy to attract his notice. Also, there is too much trial-and-error in some of the puzzles, as in one instance where what appears at first glance to be one big hotspot is really several smaller hotspots, and it matters which is chosen. Since I had made a vow to myself to play the whole game without a walkthrough (subsequently broken thanks to these and some other misunderstood or overlooked pixels), I can’t tell you how much time I spent on this particular part.  Well, really, I could tell you, but … it’s too embarrassing. Overall, though, despite the overabundance of artificial obstacles, one after another, the puzzles make sense within the context of the game and are fun to play.

But Syberia is not really about the puzzles. It is more a computer graphics showcase used as a vehicle for delivery of a magical story of one woman’s quest for the meaning of life—if not all life, at least her own. She is carried along by a wave of events on a quest for the fabled lost northern island of Syberia, whose descendants build their towns from ancient ivory and eat long-frozen mammoth meat by thawing glaciers.

The external events are driven by Hans Voralberg, an eccentric inventing savant. Hans is old and tired, and his final wish is to see the legendary living mammoths of Syberia before he kicks it.  Hans has designed and built a life-size mechanical train that travels hundreds of miles on a single windup, that stops at real train stations that just happen to have winding mechanisms already in place, and whose tracks end in the far Asian north, deep in the frozen tundra.  Yes, it sounds silly, but if you suspend your disbelief just so, it works.

As well, Hans has made a manservant automaton to act as the train’s engineer. The metal man, Oscar, is very rigidly built, so to speak, but he does talk, reason (to an extent), and have a personality.  The Oscar of the first Syberia drove me nuts. He is supposed to tug at your heartstrings a la R2D2/C3PO or Glottis (funny how those are all LucasArts/-Films creations, eh? what evil hath they wrought?), but he is purely a big fat impediment that must be overcome time and again. Oscar is too close a thing to a sidekick for my personal comfort level; anyone who knows me knows how I feel about stinkin’ sidekicks, which is that they stink. (In all fairness, Oscar is well loved by plenty of other players.) Anyway, Oscar is back. This time around, though, he plays a much smaller part, a significant plus in my view.

The player character, Kate Walker, continues, uninterrupted from the first Syberia, down her road to personal development via interactions with others. One thing I really like about these games is their respectful and fairly realistic portrayal of women, as embodied by Kate. Yes, Kate is supermodel-pretty (supposedly, that is; this is not always evidenced by the in-game Kate Walker avatar), but the whole rest of the game is supermodel-pretty as well, so she fits right in. She is young and sexy, yet she is (almost) always fully clothed; she need never resort to feminine wiles. She may make bad choices from time to time, but she is not stupid. She is capable and self-reliant; she ends up assuming a not exactly maternal but more big-sisterly caretaking role in a game world populated predominantly by male nonplayable characters.

The developers have taken a lot more care this time around in cleaning up after themselves. I seem to remember Syberia was originally conceived as a single game, and later, after development was well underway, the decision was made to split it into two. Hence the rather abrupt ending of the first game. Hence too all of those useless extra hotspots in the first game. At the time, I had theorized they were left over from the undivided game and would come into play in part deux. However, not only do those hotspots not do that, you never even see them again! But that turned out to be sloppy design in the first game; we’re talking about Syberia II, and there is none of that here.

Unlike the first game, which did stand, albeit, some might argue, somewhat shakily, on its own two feet, I do not think Syberia II would work as anything but a sequel; seeing as how it’s really the second half of a single game, I imagine my enjoyment would have been much less had I not played the first part. Accessible from the game’s main menu, there is a two- or three-minute video recap of the events of the first game. I don’t know if this was meant for players new to the game world or merely as a reminder for returning players. I definitely don’t think it would substitute for having played the original Syberia. Whatever the case, I didn’t even look at it until I was already well underway in the game proper; the new game does take up right where the old one left off, and my memory did not need refreshing—it all came flooding back within seconds.

Syberia II is not meant to be rushed through, it is intended to be savored, tasted by every side of the gaming tongue, plate licked clean in a leisurely spell of sensual gluttony. Eyes, ears, brain too—all of my gaming senses were engaged and satiated by this sumptuous repast. No, it is not perfect; it may not even have at its core a very good game (although I certainly enjoyed it). But it is a masterwork when viewed as an exemplar of the video game as art, one of the very best fusions of story and imagery extant in the medium today, and for that reason alone it deserves a place in the eventual Electronic Entertainment Hall of Fame. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Microids Publisher: XS Games Release Date: March 2004

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP PII 350 MHz processor (PIII 800 MHz recommended) 16 MB Direct3D (DirectX 8.1) compatible 3D video card (32 MB recommended) 64 MB RAM (128 MB recommended) 400 MB free hard disk space 16X CD-ROM drive (24X recommended) DirectX 7 compatible sound card

Where to Find It

GoGamer 29.90

Prices/links current as of 04/12/04Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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13 Responses to Porn is Awesome, Games Not So Much

  • Meho

    Ahahaha, funny quote there.

    Also, daymn, that’s RJ right there and I really can not feel any kind of negativity for the man. I mean he taught me so much about life that I’d be a bigot to pretend I’m above him in any way, you know.

    But of course, he’s using a completely flawed argument in his editorial. Porn does not equal sex. Porn is about spectacle (of sex or… other things), not about sex. Much of the porn I watch doesn’t really involve sex, it’s about spectacle and power and roles in the human society, but mostly about spectacle. Baudrillard once defined porn as a media where you see genitals bigger than you would ever see them in real life. Because porn is about augmenation and hyperbole.

    So are games. Neither are natural. Neither want to show us normal people doing normal things. We wouldn’t want them any other way.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Exactly! And we wouldn’t want to watch normal people doing normal things!

    That’s WHY we play games… to be extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. Violence is inconsequential.

  • Meho

    Or at least not not natural. Super Mario Bros. has it stylised down to cutesy jumps on your enemies’ heads. Shadow of the Colossus has it turned into a pornographic spectacle of giant killing. GTA turns it into a videogame aping life aping videogame.

    Violence is deeply connected to games (of any kind) for reasons I think obvious, but NATURALISTIC violence is absent from videogames most of the time. Games that make it look naturalistic, like Manhunt are games that shock us. Games that make it easy and quick, like Call of Duty do not shock us. Therefore, Vivid is Call of Duty of porn while Devicebondage or Public Disgrace is Manhunt and GTA of porn. It’s really all about being staged, unnatural, overexposed and heavily stylised in either of these cases.

  • Lewis B

    Perhaps the answer lye’s in combining the two.  Mario Porn anyone? (oh thats probably already been done 🙁 )

    Oh boy what a surreal article to read at 7:38 am 🙂

  • Lewis B

    Ahahaha no but I have now! Cover your eyes children, cover your eyes!!

  • ajax19

    “Jeremy said sex is natural and beautiful.”

    While that can be true.  I have seen enough porn in my day to know that a LOT of the sex in that, uh, genre is neither “natural” nor “beautiful”.  It’s often just incredibly degrading.

    While I agree with the simpler premise that, particularly in the US, the disparity between how much violence is deemed acceptable compared to how much nudity is deemed acceptable is incredibly out of whack and patently ridiculous, I don’t think trying to elevate porn over video games is the best way to go about expressing it.

  • Gregg B

    Erm, I think a very important distinction should be made here: porn involves real people doing very real things to each other, games do not.

    Now I’m no prude but the sex in porn is usually as cosmetically distorted, unreal and oftentimes as grotesque as the violence featured in many games but the former will always be more affecting because it’s real, in the same way as a snuff movie would be more affecting than the many brutal deaths in say, Manhunt or Postal. There are a lot of perceptual and subjective variables here but I’d wager that virtual reality will always be overshadowed by reality.

    Also, what sort of porn do you watch Meho?? Roles in human society?!! There’s me thinking it was just pounds of processed meat slamming into each other…

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I’ve always been hesitant to ask Meho that question, for fear that he might tell me. Or worse, show me.

    Many anti-gamers state that gaming is “worse” because it’s interactive, while a passive activity like watching porn or violence is not. Of course, in my view, passive voyeurism is far worse than active involvement because you’re sitting there doing nothing. What’s worse, a violent video game or one of those Hostel films? For me, at least, it’s the latter.

  • Gregg B

    I haven’t seen the Hostel films, not least because they’re apparently shit, but mainly because, er, torture doesn’t agree with me, naturally. I know it’s not real but obviously when my suspension of disbelief is tight and all I can do is watch I can find it really unsettling, as a sort of bystander.

    Conversely, however, I do think by taking control of a virtual character you’re sort of, by default, disconnected from the virtual realness of their situation. Even as videogames become verisimilarly better, short of having a brain plug or something, I don’t believe they will really ever get to the primal core of violence while an interface is distancing you from it. Context and representation will be the key until then.

    Lewis will confirm this, but when we were younger we spent a good half an hour once in the original Half-Life, with a crowbar and a wounded but invincible Barney, splattering as much blood on the walls in that particular area as humanely possible. We thought it was fun back then, sort of like painting by numbers, only without paint. Or numbers. I wish we had the screenshot. Anyway, we knew it wasn’t real so it didn’t matter in the slightest.

  • xtal

    Stomping corpses to a pulp in Dead Space is way healthier than watching Ron Jeremy porn. Come to think of it, I would reverse their labels and call Dead Space “explicit adult content” and Ron Jeremy porn flicks would get the “survival horror” rating.

  • Lewis B

    @Xtal, oh how I laughed 🙂 very good mon frère, very good 🙂

  • Irony

    How is porn not interactive? The idea that because in a videogame you choose to act violently within the context of the game, rather than passively identifying with a character on the screen acting violently, is ridiculous, because it goes both ways. Sure, you’re free to enact whatever scenarios you wish, but you can also choose not to maim or kill in situations where the game itself allows you or even encourages you to do just that (porn v. the Fallout series, maybe?). But the idea that porn itself is less interactive, and less about choices, than videogames are is just nonsensical.

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