Remasters are usually a pretty simple affair. You take an old game, spruce up the graphics, make it work on current hardware, and you’re off to the races. Syberia Remastered obviously has “remastered” in the title, but the game is actually a remake. It reuses the script, voice acting, and story FMVs from the original game, sure, but every other aspect of the game has been redone from scratch. Unfortunately, there are some bugs and issues here and there that all display a certain lack of polish, and the game hasn’t actually held up all that well in some aspects, making it a bit of a tough sell for both returning fans and new players.
Syberia Remastered tells the story of American attorney Kate Walker, as she arrives in the city of Valadilene to get documents signed to finalise her client’s purchase of a factory. However, the factory’s owner has just inconveniently passed away, so Kate has to go on a journey to track down her long-lost brother to finish the sale. The story is just okay here, though. A lot of the backstory is interesting, but many of the game’s events are more akin to pure busywork than anything else, especially in the latter part of the game, where Kate jumps through a bunch of hoops to attain items that she could have grabbed with ease.
Even the game’s conclusion feels incredibly anticlimactic and unearned, which ends things on a fairly sour note. Syberia Remastered uses all of the original voice acting from the old version of the game, but the English dub in particular is incredibly wooden and hard to listen to. I ended up switching it to the original French, which sounds far more convincing and isn’t stilted at all. The dialogue has a fair few typos too, extending to the game’s documents, which you’d think wouldn’t be an issue for a script that’s over 20 years old. Still, there’s a certain amount of charm to the game, despite how silly its events or characters can be.
While the original game made use of pre-rendered backgrounds, Syberia Remastered has absolutely none of these. Instead, the environments are all completely remade in 3D. Some of them are honestly quite gorgeous, with Valadilene in particular being especially lovely. The character models are all new, too, which is mostly as successful, but there’s one particularly jarring oddity. Since the game uses upscaled versions of the original FMVs instead of remaking them in-engine (which is a really odd choice considering they could have just remade them with the new assets), it’s just odd to see how different Kate looks.
Other characters that appear in FMVs were mostly remade very faithfully, but Kate’s character model’s face has a completely different design from the one used in the FMVs, which was an incredibly odd choice. While the original PC version was a purely point-and-click affair, here you can move Kate herself (but you can also still click your way around if you choose to do so). I do prefer having direct control of the character, but selecting objects for her to interact with is a bit awkward on a controller, as she often moves strangely to get into position once you select something.
On top of the above changes, lots of puzzles have been altered slightly. Some of them have some pretty major changes, while others have been simplified. For instance, an early puzzle where Kate needed help from a character named Momo has seen Momo’s entire involvement removed. For another, a late-game puzzle where you’re preparing a drink used to require you to melt crystallized honey, but now the honey has already been melted when you find it. All of this makes Syberia Remastered shorter and simpler than the original by a bit, but some of the removals affect some of the game’s character, like the removal of the bird flying away when you reach the church’s attic to open the way to Hans’ tomb.
Some more jankiness has been added to the game as well. Anytime Kate receives a phone call, there’s a chance the game’s inputs will lock up, requiring you to shut the whole game down entirely and restart. I saw some weird bugs here and there, too. An old drunk needs to be woken up with a spray of water after conveniently falling into a contraption that you can manipulate. After you do this and he moves to another area, returning to the contraption will show a copy of him sleeping that you can wake up again.
At one point, you need to input a code to open a gate, but you can just straight-up walk through it without it opening. There are several other spots where you can walk right through geometry as well. In one section, you’re meant to jump onto an out-of-reach area to use a blowtorch, and the jumping animation is broken, so Kate just kind of jumps and lands in the wrong direction in thin air. You can also use the blowtorch on the wall from over 20 feet away, which is absolutely not supposed to happen.
All in all, the game’s puzzles are okay-ish, but they vary wildly in quality. Most are of the “use the correct item on an object” variety, but some require a bit more thought. Others just don’t tend to make much sense, such as when you’re operating a console to launch a rocket that requires you to press a certain button a second time for an illogical reason. That whole “puzzle” just feels kind of odd, and it’s not the only one. However, there’s a lot of walking back and forth to talk to certain characters in order to move forward. Some folks have reported various softlocks, where major NPCs didn’t show up, requiring them to restart the chapter (manual saves have been strangely removed), but I had nothing of the sort happen, thankfully.
Syberia Remastered is an okay remake that makes some peculiar choices. Coupled with a story and design that’s not as engaging as it was over two decades prior, it’s not something that I think will appeal to most modern players. The removal and alteration of certain elements and the occasional bug also mean that it’s not necessarily better than the original, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not a good deal prettier for the eight-to-ten hours it lasts.
Syberia Remastered: Syberia Remastered has beautifully remade environments and has some very charming elements, but it hasn't totally aged gracefully, and this version is lacking some of what made the original game special. – Andrew Farrell
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