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I've been playing video games for over 30 years. 've played every kind of game imaginable. I started playing adventure games back in the days of text adventures (and I STILL enjoy a good text-based game). So I'm not new to adventure games. I'm a big fan of the Sam and Max games. I also am not new to games that are long on plot and short on action. Dear Esther is a game I really enjoyed, even though a lot of other people described it, amusingly, as "Walking: The Game."
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not some CoD player who accidentally bought Syberia II thinking it was a Russian FPS game. I knew what I was expecting.
First: the good. The graphics are beautiful. I admit that. But, it's also a huge problem, and I'll get to that in a second. Second: there were a couple of cut scenes that were beautiful, in particular as the Ark is leaving the native village, and there was a storm on the horizon that was pretty. And that pretty much ends the good points.
The bad? OMG, where do I start? First of all, like the original Syberia, I had a very difficult time getting into this game because the creators of this game, apparently, have never left their mothers' basements. They have no CLUE about engineering, physics, sciences. It was freaking irritating, like being beaten over the head with a book the entire time I was playing. Torches in an ice cave? A coal tender on a wind-up train (okay, that was kind of explained later, but honestly, the reasons behind it could totally have been written out of the script and not missed. It just didn't work.) The tin woodman. OMG. An oil can? Are you serious? And let me ask you this: what, exactly, was causing C3PO to move? Because there was nothing in the Tin Woodman besides a heart. How did he walk? How did he talk? How did he reason? Evil spirits? Jungles in the far Arctic coast of Russia. Explain that to me. When have there EVER been jungles there? Cutting something with a narwhale tusk? Really? Rain? In the Arctic. Rain? Flowers?
But the prize winners? Okay, the train car run by a DOG SEAL in a giant hamster wheel (and I'm not freaking kidding, though I wish I were) and it CATCHES UP to our high-speed wind-up train. Catches Up. Really?
But the cake taker. The absolutely, jaw-dropping idiocy award goes to the penguins. Penguins. In the ARCTIC The FREAKING ARCTIC! ARE YOU FREAKING 12 YEARS OLD? There are no penguins in the Arctic. There have NEVER been penguins in the Arctic. No, they are not Auks. Don't give me that. They were penguins. Penguins. In the Arctic. OMG. That is the stupidest, most ignorant thing I've ever seen come from anybody who graduated from the 8th grade. Seriously. You should be ashamed.
Let's talk graphics. Brown and gray. How am I supposed to find a flower or a rock whatever it is I'm supposed to find when everything looks the same?
Like the original Syberia, this game is LOADED with wasted space. It's just walking from one place to another, to give us a feeling of scale. And that's where this game went wrong on gameplay. The faux 3d environments just don't work. What you needed was some cartoony 2d graphics and some short cuts. You needed some less realistic colors so that we could more easily see that there was an object or lever or fish bone that we were supposed to see and pick up. More clues. More clues to tell help us avoid the incessant trial and error of "Do I push this first or this one?" The ONE place where this worked okay was in the train engine where it made sense. I could use logic and puzzle it out by looking at how things were connected. Other place? Not so much. And don't get me started on the ice cave that looked like a mouth and the other that looked like ... well, I won't go there.
Fewer annoying cinematic interruptions would have been nice. Get rid of the spoken dialogue. Hearing that annoying woman say for the hundredth time "AH! It's STUCK!" Just grates on my nerves. Put in an unobtrusive noise to show the machine doesn't work. I'm a HUGE fan of escape the room games. I've never had a problem with trial and error in any other game: where the logic makes sense and I don't have to listen to annoying and repetitive dialogue.
The characters. There is not a single character who ISN'T selfish, petty, weak, or repugnant in some way. Except maybe the orphan girl Malka.
The native people? Are you serious? "Tooktoot, nice choo-choo!" You don't find a depiction of short, fat, gibberish-talking people "took-toot, took-toot" the least bit racist or offensive? Because I did.
Finally: the plot. Character arc, anyone? Anyone? The main character resolved NOTHING. She ended, literally, no where. Why was her boss chasing her anyway? The plot and conflicts all came to zero.… Expand
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