Syberia - Steam Game

Syberia is a fairly quaint game with an unusual story behind it. You are Kate Walker, a New York lawyer looking to close the purchase of an automaton factory in the French Alps. But when the owner suddenly passes away, it is up to you to locate a mysterious yet influential heir to the fortune in order to finish the job. Along the way, you'll uncover knowledge about this particularly intriguing person, as well as information about his quest to uncover a lost civilization known to have domesticated the last of the living mammoths. The story of the first title in this series ended up being pretty good, and the detail was fairly substantial for such a linear game. The developers clearly wanted the player to follow a set storyline, so there is little secrecy in side content for the player to uncover. The characters are pretty interesting, and you learn a good bit about who they are and what their lives have been like. Kate herself is given a nice little character arc within the game that, albeit being a bit predictable, serves as a fairly good structure for a main character. I had one major complaint with the story, along with one minor one. My biggest complaint with the narrative in the first game is that what you are doing takes much longer than needed, and it seems to be a bit of padding at the hands of the developers. While the second act makes some sense in terms of why you end up in the location, the third act's plotline is very forced and unrealistic. In fact, you already have the item that allows you to complete you objective, yet the game makes you continue onwards without the option of doing so. While the payoff was marginally entertaining, as you meet a few charming characters in the last few areas, it didn't really make a lot of sense as to why Kate blindly follows directions without bending some rules. My second, and smaller complaint, is that the end of the game is extremely sudden and unrewarding. It really comes out of nowhere, and there isn't much emotional catharsis that makes it more dramatic, so it left me feeling lost. The sequel most likely will pick up from where this game left off, but the ending could have done more with a closing theme/lesson that the player could be left with. The gameplay is pretty straightforward and actually has some nice simplicity for an older adventure title. The actions weren't too confusing, and a majority of the puzzles I encountered were logical in construction. There were only a handful of illogical...