You have a hint button at your disposal at all times, but I didn’t need to use it much. Syberia: The World Before, on the other hand, is almost never aggravating and the puzzles are nearly all quite good. I like them, but their propensity for arbitrary, senseless fetch-questing often drives me up the wall. I’m lukewarm on adventure games, honestly. There are a few other characters you’ll end up playing as too. Swapping to Dana gleans combinations and the correct placements for mechanisms. One particularly interesting puzzle sees Kate repairing an automaton orchestra. Observing the past version of the area with Dana stands in for poring over documents. There are times when Kate needs to use information from documents to solve puzzles and use machinery. Many of these sections allow you to swap between Kate and Dana with no delay. Of course, Dana isn’t as much of a protagonist as Kate is, and you’ll mostly be playing through her sections when Kate finds a related document that fills in the blanks. One of Syberia: The World Before‘s best elements is the way it swaps back and forth between the past and modern day. The painting dates back to 1937, while Kate is in 2005. Using the clues provided by the painting, Kate ends up in Osthertal (which is basically a fictionalized Austria, I think) and finds herself hot on the trail of Dana Roze. It’s a pretty flimsy setup that doesn’t offer much believable motivation, but hey. ![]() She makes her promise that she’ll find what became of the woman in the painting. But things go awry and Katyusha sacrifices herself so that Kate can escape. One item is a painting that bears a suspicious likeness to Kate. Early on, they find a train adjacent to the tunnel they’re working in, only to realize it’s packed with priceless treasures. She and her cellmate and lover, Katyusha, spend their days searching for ivory and priceless items stolen by the Nazis during World War II. During the prologue, Kate finds herself a slave in a Russian salt mine after the events of the previous game. That isn’t to say that the game doesn’t flirt with such concepts, mind you. I found the story deeply compelling, but anyone in the market for higher levels of intrigue or melodrama won’t find it here. For the most part, the game has more of a slice-of-life focus where series protagonist Kate Walker merely digs into the past of a woman named Dana Roze. There’s no mystery with lives hanging in the balance. There are no mustache-twirling villains turning up the heat under our protagonist. Syberia: The World Before has a truly easygoing narrative pace, even for an adventure game. ![]() There’s a hell of a lot to enjoy here, but be warned that you’ll likely walk away feeling emptier than you’d like. But it also ends on a very jarring cliffhanger, which stings all the more since we’re not likely to get another game now that the series’ main creative force is no longer with us. Plus there are plenty of enjoyable, logical puzzles, and it’s decently lengthy to boot. The game is visually wonderful, has great characters and voice acting. When Benoît Sokal passed away during the development of Syberia: The World Before, it was a hard blow to his fans and people looking forward to continuing the series.
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