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SYBERIA 2 Game Review

If you don’t know about the first game Syberia, you can read our spoiler-free review here. 

The basic plot of the first game goes as follows:  The lawyer Kate Walker visits Europe in order to seal the deal for a corporate takeover of the automaton toy factory of the Voralberg family. The unexpected reveal of an heir forces her to set off on a journey to find him so he can sign the papers.

As goes for the sequel, this review is divided into a short spoiler-free part and a spoiler-filled part because there were some inconsistencies that I want to talk about. Beware that the screenshots will also contain no spoilers for the first part, but all major spoilers for the second.

-Spoiler-Free-

I managed to beat this game within ~ 6 hours today (I googled for help when I got stuck though). I gotta say that this is a huge improvement to the first game and if you can get it cheap for like, 2 bucks, you could check this one out and play it. There's actually a short recap of the first game accessible through the menu, so you don't have to go through Syberia first if you don’t want to. You may not understand everything perfectly though, so maybe a more detailed review on Youtube would also do the trick.

Overall: If you read our review of the first game, you know that we weren’t big fans. The second game of the series however has a far better story. The puzzles mostly make sense (at least to the degree that you can accept it) and aren't entirely random. Some characters and villains again are pretty random but it's not as bad as in the first game. And again, the story seems forced here and there, but as for this game, it's... acceptable. The worst thing is probably the protagonists "character development" where nothing that should faze her seems to faze her and her impulsiveness makes her look like a maniac who's totally lost it... like seriously. We actually laughed about how she should probably really seek help - lol.

The game for us had an annoying bug where almost every dialogue audio was cut off 2 seconds early, so we usually had to read the subtitles way faster than the characters spoke. We couldn't find a fix for that, so maybe keep that in mind.

-Spoiler-Warning (All Major Spoilers)-

Now, the storytelling was a lot better, but there were some inconsistencies or strange plot points that seemed off.  For example: You will find the Youkol people eventually, a people who lived in symbiosis with mammoths for centuries. Weirdly enough, there are train tracks that lead directly into their cave - I don’t know what I missed, but it wouldn’t make sense for the Youkol people who live so far off from any civilization to have a huge railway contraption installed that takes up most of the space in their basecamp and is made out of mammoth tusks and wooden pillars. It doesn’t feel right or logical.  A friend we know from the first game is Oscar - an automaton/robot and the train’s engineer. Because of him being such a sophisticated “machine”, the Youkol are scared of him and the story only progresses when he wears the mask of a friendly spirit so that the Youkol don’t really recognize him. Shortly after that, Oscar takes off the mask and wanders through the entire camp, passing several Youkol on his way, and it’s totally fine, noone is scared of him at all. He does that during an emergency situation, but he does it, and the lack of reaction from the Youkol makes absolutely zero sense.  

Then there is the protagonist - Kate Walker. We already mentioned that she feels like a maniac who is out of control. It’s like after finding out that her boyfriend cheated on her in the first game, something in her head just snapped and she decided to dump her job as a lawyer in New York to go on adventures with an old man that she barely knows in search of an island that she doesn’t even believe exists (as she says in the beginning of Syberia 2). Why would any person in their right mind do such a thing?

I love proper character development, but this here is just totally random and unconvincing. All she does is flinch when the villain in the story is brutally picked apart by penguins (I mean, okay, he threatened her, but still). They find the Youkol and she isn’t even amazed. She is super calm during a phone call with her mother when she should actually hurry to reach the train that has just been kidnapped. 

Also, the villain in the story is one of the nicest villains I ever saw: He lets her calmly call her friend Oscar to tell him to come to the rescue while threatening her with a mammoth tusk and stands idly by: 

The legitimately best part of the game was the ending. You do find the legendary island Syberia and there are mammoths there. It’s the shortest part of the game, this island, and if you know what you will have to do to solve the puzzles, it won’t take you 20 minutes to play through this part.  The ending cutscenes were really cute and the mammoth design was the best design and animation in the entire game. I see what the developers could manage to do with more experience and modern technology. I’m interested to play Syberia 3 next which was released in 2017 - so 13 years after Syberia 2 -but received only moderate reviews. 

I am also very much looking forward to Syberia - The World Before which is said to be released this year. It may be a great success or a huge disappointment, knowing how remakes can go. I sure hope the developers managed to learn from their past mistakes and used modern technologies and storytelling to their advantage. 

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“SYBERIA” Game Review

-Spoiler-Free-

I was very confident when I picked up this game, but it was quite disappointing.

This game was extremely boring and the story made absolutely no sense to me and was boring in itself. There's a basic idea and cool concept: a factory that focuses on sophisticated contraptions and automatons which are basically robots, and then the story about mammoths/Siberia. When that already doesn't sound too cohesive, that's no surprise, because the story isn't either.

You are supposed to find a person, all you know is the last known location of that person is Siberia. I honestly don't know if I was simply too incompetent to grasp the story, but for whatever reason the protagonist decided to immediately take a train to wherever without even knowing exactly where the person she's looking for is. 

The train had to stop 2 times because the springs of the train unwound, and that's your story right there. You end up in two different cities, have to talk to a bunch of random people, solve absolutely random puzzles, then return to talk to people you've already spoken to, only to find out that after a long time of running around, a new conversation option was available that would progress the story. Sometimes, there was absolutely no way to know how you would solve a puzzle or why you would have to talk to a specific character again. Imagine you pick up (not even use) an item, and suddenly ONE door out of DOZENS of doors that were previously locked is now unlocked - have fun going through all that hassle to try every door each time you get stuck - that's what the game would have you do without the contemporary help of walkthrough guides.

The conversations with the characters were dreadfully long and seldom interesting. There are absolutely random plot ideas with a random villain and a random opera singer who are in some way connected to the person we're looking for, but don't really contribute to the story other than keeping you busy for many hours senselessly.

There is a huge disconnect between the story and the gameplay/plot. Forced characters, forced plot, forced drama, forced villains. It feels like they had a basic concept and idea and forced the story around it because they had no better ideas and not actually a proper story to tell. There were no really interesting and sensical clues to the whereabouts of the person we're looking for, which I think is actually sad, because as we get to know within the first 20 minutes, that person was declared dead by their father after running away as a child. 

There could have been an amazing story to tell about that person’s life and experiences. And our protagonist, at that, has a character development that makes no sense either, when instead, she could have developed much differently whilst uncovering what had happened to the person throughout their life and following their trail.

The game has a great soundtrack, I'll give it that, and I will play the other games just to find out if the developers improved these things. We will publish our review shortly. I don't know if plotlines like these were considered nifty and clever back in 2002. I reckon that at that time, developers were still figuring out where they could go with video games and were mostly programmers, not writers. I don't exactly understand the positive reviews, but this game was boring to me, non-cohesive and just straight out flat. At least in 2021 when we’re used to entirely different dimensions of storytelling. Wouldn't play it to have fun. You might wanna check it out anyway if you’re interested in the franchise. The game is not just “trash”. I suppose you could have fun if story-cohesiveness isn’t important to you and if you just wanna play it for the puzzles or to see where the basic concept ideas lied. 

Of course, that is just my opinion, so let us know if you think differently and tell us why! 

On a little side note: We’re Germans and just wanted to mention that this translation in the game sounds funny and isn’t really correct. Maybe the other translations aren’t either, it’s no big deal, but it deserves mentioning nonetheless. 😄

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Abby’s Face Model

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Neil Druckmann on Twitter. If you've played The Last of Us Part II you'll get it.

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Cat was meant to appear in The Last of Us Part II!

Little is known about Ellie's ex-girlfriend, and we only see two depictions of her throughout the game, but originally Cat was meant to actually appear in the game, as confirmed in an interview with co-writer Halley Gross.

In earlier stages of development, Cat was supposed to appear during the dance scene at the end of the game. Players would have had the option to have a “sassy” conversation with Cat before Ellie has her first kiss with Dina. The scene was cut, however, as it wasn't "progressing anything."

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Setting the Rat King on Fire! (The Last of us 2 )

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Wanna join a cozy group for talking to like-minded people?

If you’re on Facebook and maybe even part of one of the The Last of Us groups there, you will probably have noticed the constant hate speech and discrimination present among the community. The groups don’t seem to be properly moderated.  We would like to use the opportunity and promote our group. We made one to prevent just that and create a safe place for people enjoying and loving the game who want to talk to others on a safe, respectful basis even if opinions differ.   Feel free to join! We’d love to see you there. <3 https://www.facebook.com/groups/329133678242685/?multi_permalinks=330306588125394¬if_id=1597623717201327¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic

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Happy to see our good little boy Buckley from The Last of Us 1 is doing fine in TLOU2 ❤️🐶

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Future Days - Ellie x Joel Tribute The Last of Us II

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“Got you asshole!”

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We made a short voice acting comparison of Laura Bailey’s performance as Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Abby Anderson from The Last of Us Part II after we found out she voiced both of them.

We think the difference is impressive! Laura Bailey is a great voice actress.    

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The Last of Us 2 - Symbolism of Eyes

---MAJOR SPOILER WARNING----

I would like to talk about something that really stuck with me after playing The Last of Us 2, and which really made me think a lot. This is gonna be a loong post lol. Not sure anybody will read this. 

We know that the motto of the Fireflys is "When you're lost in the darkness, look for the light." Quite obviously, the ongoing problem addressed in The Last of Us 2 is that our characters “have stopped looking for the light.” The game revolves around blind hate, revenge and retaliation. And loss as the origin of those. 

Ellie’s journal entries are as dark as can be. Most of them are dedicated to Joel of course. You’ll probably have noticed that she never draws his eyes. All she does is practice drawing eyes a lot. What’s more, she keeps talking about feeling blind herself, she says she’s lost the light.

For me, it’s like she doesn’t see any hope, no joy, no future in which she can find true happiness ever again. She’s *had* this hope. She wanted to forgive Joel for what he did, start anew. They’ve wasted a lot of time because Ellie understandably couldn’t forgive him so easily for what he’s done. At the end of the game, we get to see the last conversation that happened between them, the night before Joel dies. In this conversation, Ellie tells him that she “would like to try” to forgive him. And that’s probably the moment they reconnected after years of distance, tension and resentment. Ellie speaks of this last conversation in one of her early journal entries: 

I was thinking about the meaning of Ellie not being able to draw his eyes. One that came to my mind is that whenever she tries to imagine them, all she can see is his disfigured face right before he dies. 

Ellie looked him in the eyes and begged for him to get up. It was the last time they really looked each other in the eyes, had this connection, maybe saw all the things they went through together flash before them right before it was taken away from them. We find out that she has PTSD or something very similar to it when she lives on the farm with Dina. She can’t get the images out of her head: 

Despite them having other people in their lives after settling in Jackson, they complemented and gave each other what they needed the most. 

Despite Ellie saying it, we know that they they could never be done with each other, because too much connects them. That’s what the first game was all about, after all. 

Ellie had hurt Joel over and over again. He’s not a hero, but we love him, because we love Ellie, and because we can understand why he did what he did. And Ellie does too. Her pain and hurt is just as understandable. She met him with almost cruel resentment and rejection all the time, got angry at him for small things, even when he meant well (like after she kissed Dina). 

It’s this fight they had that she remembers right before deciding to finish what she’s started, to find Abby and kill her. When she couldn’t sleep on that farm, she got up, went to her room, closed the window, knocked over the guitar and thought of that night. 

And I don’t think this is all about revenge. I think Ellie feels deeply guilty for having been to him that way, because she understands how much she means to him, and because she understands how deeply hurt and broken he is himself. She never wanted things to be like this between them, and she just wanted to forgive him in the end - she loves him and understands his pain better than anybody else.  

But she never got to get things right. This chance was taken away from them, her forgiveness came “too late”. I think Ellie is so deeply broken herself, and I feel like she hates herself. Hates that she was the one who didn’t turn when Riley did. That her life only would have mattered if they killed her to make a cure. All these years, she was mean and cruel toward him. Now he’s dead, and part of her wants to make it up to him. 

By wanting to kill Abby, she doesn’t only want to avenge Joel, she wants to redeem herself. 

Notice how she can’t draw Joel’s and Abby’s eyes, but she can draw JJ’s and Jesse’s eyes? 

I think that that she can’t draw their eyes has a good reason. With Joel, it’s not only that she can’t get the images out of her head. I also don’t think it’s because she can’t remember what he looked like - I think she can. All too well. 

I think it’s because if she imagined his eyes before her, it’s like Joel would reflect everything she does and did. His eyes would “stare” at her, as she wrote in one journal entry, but then she replaced it with “smile”. She associates him with warmth and love, but what she does is losing herself. And he’d never want that. She does things that deeply traumatize her more and more. She tortures people, kills a pregnant woman. Looking him in the eyes would mean reflecting on her actions and on herself. Putting loved ones at risk and prioritizing revenge while neglecting her family and other relationships. Looking him in the eyes would mean for her to acknowledge that Joel would never condone that. He’s gone and nothing she does can change it. And he’d want her to be safe and stay true to herself and her values. Not be blinded by hate and grief. 

Abby’s eyes represent something similar. Ellie knows that Joel crossed a lot of people. She knows he killed hundreds of people, especially Fireflys, including Marlene (although we don’t know if she knows that). She knows that he did a lot of bad shit in the past. Abby and her friends spared Ellie and Tommy, and that indicates that they aren’t universally bad people. Even when Dina asks Ellie what she thinks why they spared them, Ellie doesn’t want to talk about it and says that it doesn’t matter. But it does. 

And she’s avoiding and denying this gray area. She’s dividing the world into good and bad now, disregarding everything in between. Even in the end, when she sees that Abby is just a normal human being like Ellie is, taking care of Lev, she feels obliged to kill her. 

Jesse and JJ don’t represent her blind hate. They represent the love and people in her life that still make her happy and care about her. The life she could have, if she were able to “leave it all behind”. She doesn’t associate them with pain and loss. 

Only when she finally has the choice to kill Abby, she remembers the last conversation she had with Joel - and it was about forgiveness. But it was not only about deciding to forgive him. It was about understanding that the world isn’t as simple as good and bad, black or white. People are more than that, just like Joel was neither a hero, nor a villain. Just like Abby is neither a hero nor a villain. 

Of course, by deciding to break the cycle of revenge, which is the most obvious topic in the game, she spares Lev of going through the same pain Ellie and Abby did. But I think something deep inside her forgives Abby for what she’s done. I think Ellie understands that Abby isn’t just a bad person, just like Joel wasn’t. By stopping there, Ellie undergoes the growth not to be like Abby and kill the one who’s responsible for her loss, just like Abby grew and decided not to kill Dina despite the fact that Ellie killed Mel. 

And she finally lets her mask slip. When she decides to let Abby live, she finally accepts that Joel is dead and “reconciles” with him. She decides not to turn into something she’s not and let her grief and hate get the better of her. Ellie understands what she’s done, the mistake she’s made. How she’s lost herself and how she wronged Dina. 

And that’s when she can finally draw his eyes. 

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Now that more people played the game and build their own opinion instead of being blindly hateful, the score is going up ⬆️

Already at 5.0 upward, a huge difference to the 3.3 a week ago. The game slowly reaches the user score it deserves 🙏

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