Syberia Review (Sailor Gloom)
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This is a slow game, it asks of you to step off of the hamster wheel of modern life and take a deep breath. Which is exactly what Kate has to do on her adventure.
It took me awhile to get back to this and get over the initial hump of boredom but after that and dwelling on it awhile it was really a pretty serene and contemplative experience.
As far as adventure games go, its pretty basic, maybe even anemic. There aren't that many things you can inspect to hear Kates commentary on. The puzzles don't require a lot of thought and there is no item combining so no rubber duck puzzles. The background art is nice though and the story, while simple, has some nice themes. The main one being that the modern world has left behind a lot and the hustle and bustle of modern life has lost a bit of magic and whimsy in the process. All the areas you explore here are in a period of transition, as the last bits of the old world give out a final sigh.
The best part for me was watching Kate change, she starts out all business looking to do her lawyer duties and close a business deal. But as time goes on the tightened grasp of the modern world loosens and she regains that sense of wonder and adventure that we all have as a kid but lose as we get older.
This reminded me a lot of Galaxy Express 999. Which I watched for the first time earlier this year and it became one of my favorite anime ever. There are a lot of similarities, the anachronistic train, the automaton engineer, chasing a dream that is unlikely to come true, and shaping oneself through the journey. You will stop at station to station and get a glimpse into peoples lives from the uniquely melancholic perspective of the traveler, unable to get too involved because after all you are just passing through. Along the way you will interact with these mechanical contraptions, falling apart but still beautiful in their complication and excess. While the march of efficiency washes over the rest of the world with robots and such, in these dusty corners of the earth you can still relish in the song and dance of the automatons.
The cell phone Kate carries was a genius bit of design, it maintains a window into the modern world along the way. Sometimes through automated voice messaging systems you call to solve a puzzle. Or also a handful of people will call and bug Kate about some inane drama, or work stress, or gossip. All of which starts out familiar and mundane, its the type of phone calls we all get in the real world. But as time goes on, against the backdrop of Kates adventure into these strange lands these calls feel increasingly silly and out place. Like seeing yourself in a photograph you didn't know was taken or a strange angle through multiple mirrors. Its jarring from a renewed perspective. Is this really the best way to live our lives?
As far as how the game runs, you'll have to use one of the fixes floating around to play it on a modern system. I used dgvoodoo2 and after some tweaking I was able to play it through without issue, with the added benefit of being able to run a reshade on it and with some gaussian blur and some contrast boost to iron out some compression of the backgrounds and give better depth its quite nice looking.
Give it a try when you are in the mood for something slower paced, and for anyone that does like it I do really recommend checking out Galaxy Express, the original TV run not the movies.