![]() ![]() Kate has to break a chain to a boat to escape the mental institution through a waterway. ![]() One very early puzzle made me burst out laughing in the stupidity of its logic. What also feels off is the logic behind most of the puzzles. Whether you’re using a mouse/keyboard combo or a controller doesn’t matter, because either way something’s going to feel off. That’s not even mentioning that the controls to this game are pretty terrible – the simple act of walking up to an object and looking at it feels like a chore. Textures popping in and out of existence, NPCs clipping through each other, the camera losing focus of Kate, random frame stuttering, the cursor refusing to highlight the right object, and one instance of freezing that magically fixed itself after ten seconds. Which reminds me that Syberia 3 is a bit of a mess on the technical side of things. The real kicker is the dialogue’s tendency to just cut out of existence entirely, leaving lines hanging or interrupting sentences. It doesn’t help that the recording quality is lacklustre across the board, in some cases making me painfully aware of the actors’ mic location or quality. Characters either sound nothing like how they look to the point of comical cognitive dissonance or speak with such passive woodenness that it feels like they’re half-heartedly reading from a script while browsing Twitter. Practically everyone else, however, is horrible or horribly miscast. She brings an emotional intensity and plainspoken charm to the role, acting as a large contributing factor to why I loved the character so much. To give credit where it’s due, though, Sharon Mann absolutely slays as Kate Walker again. Not that the voice acting is necessarily good, though. The brunt of Syberia 3 involves Kate trying to piece together what, exactly, happened to her and her robotic companion-on top of lending a hand to the oppressed Youkals. She wakes up in a mental institution with a several month gap in her memory and a secret agency hot on her trail, on top of being accused of the murder of aforementioned companion. After helping her travelling partner fulfil his dream of finding living mammoths deep in the Russian wilderness, she became lost at sea and was found by the nomadic Youkal tribe. Players once again take control of immensely likeable protagonist Kate Walker. This leads to the long-awaited Syberia 3 feeling like a game released several years too late, and even then, one that would’ve felt unfinished had it been released in 2010 or so. ![]() It’s clear, unfortunately, that Microids wasn’t paying much attention to the changes happening in the genre. A lot has changed since the mid-2000s, though, and adventure games just aren’t what they used to be. It’s been 13 years since Syberia II’s emotionally harsh tease of a conclusion, and around seven since its follow-up was originally supposed to be published. Game development doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and taking too long to ship a product can mean that said product runs the risk of feeling like a relic as opposed to a new title-just ask Duke Nukem. ![]()
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