izigame.me

I hesitated a lot between giving this game a positive or a negative review but it's going to be a negative one in the end.
I still have to say that I enjoyed the game and I understand the appeal and why so many people love it but I'm not sure that I would recommend it to anyone without explaining the negative parts first.
Let's start with the good things: there is an interesting story there with character development, the game is easy to play, the controls are intuitive, the graphics are beautiful and imaginative, the voice acting is good and the music is nice. I also liked the animations of the characters, not just the walking and running parts, but also the actions that happen only once during the game, they all have a nice little animation that is well made. The cutscenes are also well done and integrate well with the rest of the game. In terms of puzzles I don't think there's anything too illogical or frustrating, if anything I think they're more on the easy side.
There are however several things that I liked less.
First, there's a bit too much backtracking for my taste. The game succeeds at making you feel that you're in a physical space where the distances are realistic. There is for example a moment early in the game when you need to go out of town to do something, and from the moment you leave the main street until you get there you have to cross five screens where literally nothing happens, there's nothing to interact with and you just walk through them, it's just scenery. This is not a problem in itself, and is certainly not a problem in this particular case (I actually like it). However in other parts of the game there's plenty of going back and forth through areas that you have already seen a hundred times. I have seen that other reviewers found this very irritating. For me it was just mildly annoying, but annoying nonetheless.
A related problem is that although you can generally run to speed things up there are plenty of staircases, bridges, doors, and similar, where the animations are "scripted" and your character stops, moves into a certain position and then performs the action at a slower pace. This happens a lot during the game and makes the backtracking problem more frustrating.
In terms of interaction I found this game rather limited. Although the screens are realistic and full of details you cannot examine, move, take, ... almost anything. If a part of a scene stands out you almost certainly cannot have your character look at it, describe it or try to use your objects there. In fact, you are typically only allowed to use an object in the place where it's supposed to be used. If you try it anywhere else the cursor takes the "this won't work here" shape and that's it. The places where you can casually examine apparently irrelevant elements of the scenery are so few and far between that it's often a strong hint that they are part of a puzzle. "I have no idea why this is important but it's the only thing that I was allowed to examine in the past five screens, so I'll have to do something with it later", I actually solved a couple of puzzles with this.
And this gets me to the part that I perhaps liked the least about Syberia, and it's that the locations feel cold, lifeless and static. This is partly because of what I just said: you cannot interact with almost anything, not even have your character describe out loud the things that she sees or her failed attempts at using objects where they don't belong. Also, and this has to do with the technology used to make the game, most locations are basically static photos where nothing else moves apart from your character and some water effects in some cases. I found it harder to immerse myself in the game and believe that I'm in a real place where people exist and had a life before I arrived.
This certainly doesn't happen in 2D games like Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight or the Blackwell games, but also not in Grim Fandango which is technologically closer to Syberia.
There is for example the second main location of the game, Barrockstadt, which feels like a ghost city with an abandoned train station, houses in ruins, empty streets, surrounded by a wall and kilometers of wasteland and emptiness and yet there's this big University right there and a completely usable railway crossing through enemy territory (?!). I find it very hard to imagine such a place, let alone immerse myself in it.
And finally there's the writing which is... weird. There is an interesting general idea there, a US lawyer that travels to Europe to oversee the purchase of a factory and has to disentangle a family mystery. The development of the main character is interesting, and actually the frequent phone calls she has with her boss, friends and relatives have the normal, serious tone that one would expect in a case like this.
However some of the things that happen during the journey are way too cartoonish (like the rectors of the University) or downright illogical. For example everything what happens in the Industrial City (?) of Komkolzgrad: the bad guy steals the hands of your automaton and tells you that in order to recover them you have to go to a different city and bring a world-famous opera singer (?) to give a concert. And then you say "sure, why not" (?), go there, tell the woman that "an old fan of yours wants a private concert in his creepy underground base in an abandoned industrial place", she says "of course!" (?!), then she arrives and is immediately captured by the evil guy and that is followed by a surreal escape scene with clumsy attempts at stopping you both. That whole part of the story is a big wtf. Also, earlier in the game, the part where the guard at the wall in Barrockstadt thinks that a dead tree in the horizon is an enemy soldier that has been there for years (!!) is ridiculous. It would work in a cartoonish game with goofy characters like Day of the Tentacle, but not here. In general I don't think the game mixes the serious and the absurd very well.
I did like the last location of the game (the hotel in Aralbad), somehow the place felt more real and the characters more likeable. In general I liked the ending of the story as well and if everything was more consistent throughout the game I would have written a more positive review.
But as things are, I'll leave it in "yes... but". It's not a bad game but I think you should know what you're getting.