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I love the dilapidated Baranour, with its radioactive zones, the homely yet troubled Valsembor and its dirty clinic with a surprisingly pristine lobby, showing you that the entrance to the building is all about keeping up appearances, to make people believe nothing is wrong. Faces have detail but hands, legs and fingers have such messy textures that I seriously spent five minutes staring at one of the evil doctors’ fingernails.īut as is tradition in the Syberia series, the environments are gorgeous, with intricate details that tell you so much about the world and its people that it baffles me how they still went with the heavy-handed writing.
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If you’ve read my reviews before, you know visuals aren’t ever a point of much criticism as I don’t really care that much about them, but it really struck me just how stiffly the characters moved and how low the quality of the character models was, except for their faces. What the hell happened to this setting between Syberia 2 and 3? Did Kate sleep for 50 years in her coma? Have some consistency please! Yet in Syberia 3, the detective has a cellphone, he uses zip-ties to hold Kate for a microsecond and the villains have Helicopters and AK-47s. Hell, Hans’ train is another technological marvel. It’s an industrial world, where the greatest advance are clockwork automatons. What happened to the setting? Syberia 1 & 2 are clockwork steampunk wonders. Now that I mention all of this, I think of something else. He simply does what they all do, point to the player character and ask you to fix things, because they know it’s a video game and thus they must be useless. Yet, this never plays out, he never acts out and purposely tries to derail the migration. While Kate is getting the Youkol transportation, they show the villainous Doctor Olga using hypnosis to plant suggestions in the spirit guide’s mind, particularly on giving up on the quest and taking their tribe back north and settle, because “nomad bad” apparently.
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One of the key lessons in writing fiction is “show, don’t tell,” and in a video game you can use the environment, character animations and even the voice acting to give players important information without drowning them in minutes-long blocks of exposition…which is exactly what Syberia 3 does, the English voice cast not even keeping the emotional intensity throughout, resulting in a monotone that shows just how bored the performers were. It’s almost as if the game needed villains but no one bothered to give them something reasonable to pursue. Villains even state they want the Youkols to return to the north and abandon their nomadic ways because, “such things have no place in the modern world.” Yet there is no sign as to what sort of problem their migration might mean for them, making their cause vague at best and frankly nonsensical at worst. The problem is that Syberia 3’s writers aren’t exactly subtle about it and pretty much hammer this point down in the most heavy-handed way possible about every five minutes of the game.
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Syberia 3’s plot is about the modernisation of the world and the viability of ancient cultures and traditions in the face of it. They nurse her back from the brink of hypothermic death but eventually leave her in the care of the doctors at the Valsembor clinic, a small town the tribe approaches on their way to the sacred mating grounds for their Snow Ostriches. Syberia 3 opens very soon after those events, with the Youkols, the nomadic tribe that helped Kate on the last leg of her journey, finding her unconscious in the snowy fields. I remember my lasting impressions of Syberia 2, those being disappointment at its very open ending, which resolved very little in terms of the storyline threads it had spun, particularly relating to Kate Walker and her family and employers in the US and their incessant pursuit of her. We thought Kate Walker’s journey was over after bringing Hans to meet with the Mammoths, but after a rough time, she’s embarking on another quest, to help the Youkols reach their promised land in Syberia 3.