Syberia Remastered review: still good but not better than the original

Syberia, the 2002 adventure game directed by Belgian artist Benoît Sokal, is very much a product of its time. Despite being released during the point-and-click adventure genre’s most pronounced fallow period, Syberia was a significant commercial hit.

It’s not necessarily considered a classic the way many of the big 90s adventure games are but its interesting world and (mostly) straightforward puzzles make it a solid example of the genre, and the game went on to spawn three sequels, the most recent in 2022.

Syberia Remastered follows lawyer Kate Walker in her quest to track down Hans Voralberg, the heir to a factory in the fictional French city village of Valadilène.

In the world the game is set in, modern technology exists alongside retro-futuristic mechanical contraptions. Kate has a mobile phone, but locations are powered by cranks and cogs and gears. That includes the automatons – metal men who do not like being called robots – who operate much of the world’s machinery.

Returning to the world of Syberia

Syberia Remastered, despite its name, is actually somewhere between a remaster and a remake of the 2002 release. There have been some tweaks to a few of the original game’s worst puzzles, and the controls are slightly improved.

The biggest changes are visual, thanks to the completely overhauled graphics. Other than this, the game is more or less the same game as the original and the remaster maintains much of the original Syberia‘s jank: awkward invisible walls, a few dodgy vocal performances, some lousy puzzles and a huge amount of backtracking.

On some level, this jank makes for a pleasantly nostalgic experience. The game looks modern – except for the cutscenes, which are the same full motion video from the original game – but feels like something right out of the early 2000s.

For better or worse, it reminded me of playing awkward 3D point-and-click adventures games on the Xbox and Xbox 360, games like Still Life, Gray Matter and Broken Sword 3, which were very comforting despite their strange controls and awkward pacing.

Improving the graphics

Fundamentally, Syberia is a pretty decent little adventure game, slow and slightly boring in a way that appeals to a certain part of my brain. It’s the kind of game that will grind to a halt for an extended cutscene about mammoths, important to the wider lore of the series but not to the puzzle you’re in the middle of solving.

The puzzles are rarely too difficult, the world is fun to explore, and Kate, while not the most fleshed-out character, is relatively likeable and given a bit of an arc.

The first game is inherently more compelling because you know that sequels exist, and that you are building towards something as you run around the game’s locations, putting keys into locks and grumbling when objects are hidden in all the on-screen clutter.

But that was also true of the original release. Years ago, I picked up a double-pack of Syberia 1 & 2 on the Switch for about $3. (It’s frequently quite cheap on Steam too.) The original game is fairly easy to get your hands on, which makes Syberia Remastered, which has arrived with a price tag around $40 to $45 depending on your system, a tougher sell.

The visual overhaul is actually rather nice, rendering some of the environments in much richer detail than before, but the original game didn’t look bad either. The 2000s-era graphics would still fit the game’s vibe, slightly unstuck from time as it feels.

Because the original Syberia exists and is still easy to access, the more I played the remaster, the more I thought that, actually, it might have been nice if it had been polished up further. What if the controls weren’t awkward? What if some of the annoying steps in certain puzzle chains were streamlined? What if Kate, at least, seemed a bit perturbed when characters started casually throwing around slurs?

Syberia is prettier now but what would the best version of this game – one made to sit alongside the original rather than supersede it – have looked like?

Watch the Syberia Remastered trailer

A remaster that doesn’t go far enough

Some of the decisions made in the game’s development speak to a possible lack of budget and scope. The music loops awkwardly, often hitting a dramatic crescendo during mundane conversations and drowning out dialogue.

Dialogue remains untouched from the original, including a few slurs that now feel unpleasantly anachronistic, and the subtitles are shockingly inaccurate. If you’re examining a book and pick the ‘read’ option to get a more legible version of the text, it’ll be absolutely riddled with typos and errors. It’s a strange issue to encounter in what’s meant to be a polished, definitive version of a classic game.

Syberia is not a particularly difficult game, but the puzzles sometimes rely on your memory of information that was delivered in dialogue that can’t be revisited. One puzzle near the end of the second area has a solution so silly, and so reliant on you remembering a number sequence from an earlier conversation, that having a guide bookmarked is all but mandatory.

Considering how straightforward most of the rest of the game is, I was surprised that this, too, wasn’t changed. If I’m going to be frustrated by such a fundamentally flawed puzzle design, I’d at least like to be able to throw my hands up and say it was a different time.

I enjoyed playing Syberia Remastered, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it when the original game is right there and has held up quite well. As a product of its time, it’s a little easier to forgive – or at least work with – some of its flaws. Ultimately, the fact this new version sits awkwardly between a remake and a remaster means that it doesn’t quite feel like either.

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