15.2 hours played
Written 26 days ago
Syberia 3 is what I'd call an enjoyable disaster of a game.
On the technical side, it's a complete mess. The interface is terrible and the controls even more so, the camera is maddening, the dialogue randomly cuts out then cuts back in again, the subtitles can accidentally be pulled around the screen during gameplay, and the cursor constantly disappears.
Speaking of, the gameplay is more of a mixed bag. The puzzles are hit and miss, with some being obvious, others too obtuse, but most hitting a decent sweet spot. Some of the logic is very arbitrary, for example at one point you have to craft a torch to progress, but you need a piece of fabric for it. Earlier on, a character gave me a scarf, so I thought that was the obvious solution, but no, turns out you're just meant to pull some random piece of cloth from the nearby environment, and the scarf isn't even an option.
Similarly, there's a moment where you have to smash several lights on a boat but have nothing to smash them with, so I think to go down to the massive rack of hammers that I saw below deck earlier, but nope! Wrong again, you're just meant to find a big piece of metal in a box nearby. There were also several instances of me getting stuck not because I couldn't figure out the solution, but because I didn't have a crucial inventory item I was meant to have. You're also sometimes gated from progress until you've spoken to a specific NPC, a problem carried over from Syberia 2.
The soundtrack is lovely, and it's really nice to have Sharon Mann back as Kate. Sadly the rest of the voices in this game bar one or two exceptions are *terrible*. The old German watchmaker who is meant to be a similar age to Hans in the last games speaks like a dorky American college student, and gallingly he also shares voice actor with the gruff-looking Russian bar owner AND Mr bloody Marson from Syberia 1+2 (albeit only in one short scene). For a game set in Russia, there are genuinely 0 Russian or even authentically eastern European sounding accents. Oscar is the one that upsets me the most, though. He sounds so soulless, and has lost all his personality from the previous two games.
Story-wise, there barely is one. Nothing really happens in this game, other than the explanation for how Kate got back from Syberia. The overarching goal of "help the Youkols with the migration" feels both uninteresting and unwarranted. The far more interested aspects of the story, in my opinion, were finding out that Kate is wanted in the US for embezzlement and suspected murder (don't worry, that's not a spoiler, you get told it very early on), but the game doesn't really do anything with those points; it just seems to be the nudge nudge to make you think you've got no choice but to keep moving with the Youkols.
Despite all that, I still like this game, and if you can get into awkward groove of the terrible interface, it's got a charm that made me keep wanting to come back. Kate is a joy of a character, even if everyone around her is wooden and poorly acted. The ending sucks, but it doesn't bother me much because it's not like the story itself was going anywhere.
I can't see much value in playing it if you haven't played the first two games, but if you have, grab this one on sale and try to enjoy the jank. It's not worth skipping imo, but it's also not worth playing if you don't have prior investment in the series.