Full Course: Syberia

Benoît Sokal. There are few names in gaming that grab my interest as much as that one, which is strange, because it was only just last year that I found out that this man existed. Born in Brussels, Belgium, Sokal was mostly known as a comic artist for most of his years, creating a series about a drunk, smoking detective duck called Inspector Canardo. He created a pretty wide variety of pulpy works, coloring them with a personal computer, and he probably would have remained a minor figure in the comics world if not for the spread of the CD-ROM. This invention inspired Sokal to try making games, and his ambition grew as he partnered with Microids, one of Europe’s most significant names in the point and click genre. The end result was 1999’s Amerzone, and come 2002, Sokal topped that with one of the most memorable point and clicks ever made: Syberia. It became his most famous work and a major series among point and click die-hards.

It’s fitting that a game so focused on riding a train would go off the rails so hard.

Syberia is genuinely one of the most creative games ever made, and one of the most truly mature game series I’ve ever seen. This was a major release in the time of Halo, people. Syberia is simply unlike anything else in the gaming world, outside of Sokal’s own work. He hasn’t directed as much as you’d expect, partly due to him going solo and failing at it. He founded White Birds Productions to produce quality point and click games after Syberia 2, but a few projects bloated in development and the studio went under, though not before producing some notable work. While Paradise is probably the most famous of their titles, a story about a European woman in the middle of an African civil war, the one that stuck with me was Sinking Island, a murder mystery set on an island hotel sinking in an Earth shaking hurricane.

Sokal’s game work is obsessed with the natural world and old world cultures, not to mention how men challenge those worlds with modernization and violence. I use “men” and not “humanity” because women are often victims or the first of the civilized world smart enough to break away from the way things are. While I have yet to play Paradise, the setting and premise tells me those themes are loud and proud. Sinking Island makes this mostly subtext, as you get to see this incredible art deco hotel and watch as it slowly falls apart and sinks into the deep blue sea, and the women you meet are often just done with the toxic masculinity bullshit they regularly deal with. You learn more about the dead man who made the amazing hotel tower and all of his dark secrets, and you also learn of how he tried to abuse the native people and entrap the chief’s daughter. It frames the destruction of the island as some sort of act of god, a flood of fury and vengeance for injustices done not only to nature, but humanity in general for perpetrating such horrible culture. The fact the killer ends up being a Republican just feels like the cherry on top of this patriarchy idiocy. That’s not to say Sokal is a particularly feminist minded writer, but there are definitely shades in there to different degrees of success. Needless to say, his first games carry these same themes.

I’ll get to Syberia in a moment, but I think it’s important to talk about Amerzone first (consider it a bonus). Amerzone is a loose adaptation of one of Sokal’s past works, which just so happened to be a story arc from the Inspector Canardo series. Odd, as the game itself never gives the impression that a drunken duck who chews cigars is involved in any events presented. The story has the main character traveling to a South American country ruled by a brutal dictator to help a now dead explorer bring back the thought extinct white birds species by returning an egg he stole from a native woman he loved. Men being prideful dicks to innocent women and betraying nature is a running thing in his work, you’ll find.

All of those themes I mentioned are in play, with a stomped down native culture presented as ghosts and the source of guilt for the explorer who abandoned and betrayed them. The dictator, Alvarez, is seen mostly in TV spots, posters, and felt through the forces he has stationed, only to be revealed as a broken and dying old man unable to let go of his obsession. The majority of the game is simply exploring strange and wondrous jungle, complete with fantastical creatures you could totally believe are real animals somewhere out there. The entire experience is about taking in these amazing sights and being the final observer of the characters of a story that already happened. That sounds boring, but it’s oddly captivating.

In a way, your character is an explorer themselves. They’re seeing things few in the modern world have ever seen, stuff not even Alvarez has seen as you go deep in the greens. You also experience all these exciting events after the fact, examining documents and ruins for clues and information. There’s no big final confrontation: the bad guy dies of a heart attack. Bad guy speech, then boom, dead. Your last act is sacrificing your own life to bring back one of the strangest, most magical creatures you have ever seen and allow the Amerzone to continue as it always has. The only technology you control is a bizarre, outdated marvel with multiple modes of transportation, but a grave fragility. The works of man are incredible, but they rust and decay as nature overtakes them, or simply overpowers them. Our great works are nothing compared to mother Earth. Only the natives seem to truly understand this, but the inability to adapt to modern life lead to their end. Or rather, the modern world refused to let them live as they wished.

Amerzone is an oddly beautiful, haunting ride that sticks with you. It’s a perfect distillation of all of Sokal’s work I’ve experienced so far. This extends to mechanics, as Amerzone is remarkably simplistic. You move around screens and do things with machines until thing happens and you continue on. Sokal seems obsessed with old machinery, especially early 1900s industrial boom stuff, extending it into clockpunk contraptions.

Clockpunk basically steampunk with gears instead of vapor, and it’s rarely explored in great detail thematically. The -punk styles are supposed to be focused on talking about systems of power, like cyberpunk with capitalist futures and steampunk with industrial pasts, but they often devolve into rule of cool scenery productions. Sokal’s use of clockpunk is somewhere in the middle, because these contraptions are often not portrayed as tools of the modern corrupt power structure, but the most simple form of high end, man-made technology that was thrown aside to rust. These simple systems turned into almost mythical wonders are about the only pieces of technology Sokal seems to genuinely portray as positive in any way, possibly because they don’t generate any pollutants or function particularly well as weapons. They’re non-violent contraptions that can co-exist with the natural world, something we even get to see a little of in Syberia 3.

The main ship in Amerzone functions all clockpunk style, with unnecessarily long and complicated steps to take to get the thing to do what you want, but you can understand the simple tool logic behind it. The fact it’s able to do so many things with this simple set-up is the surprising part, and it makes the ship feel like your partner and not just a tool. It’s someone you constantly learn more about, sharing an intimacy as you work together to perform feats. In some ways, clockpunk machines are close to being pets – once again, something you get to see first hand in Syberia 3. They can help their creators without harming the natural world around them. However, even the complicated automatons of Syberia are mostly imitations of life, and they can’t really thrive the same way without humanity.

The clockpunk and early industrial style is a double-edged sword for gameplay. At best, messing with the functions of these contraptions is almost hypnotic, seeing what works and doesn’t work and what will do what in relative quiet. You feel like you’re tinkering with a new toy and learning how it functions and what potential it could have in the process. At worst, they force you to move around all over the place to perform simple acts, or are so esoteric that they begin to frustrate one a great deal. It’s Syberia’s complete focus on this aesthetic that becomes its greatest strength and greatest weakness.

Syberia follows Kate Walker, a New York corporate lawyer trying to finish a deal to buy out an old French toy factory upon the death of its owner, Anna Voralberg. Things become complicated, however, once Kate discovers from the family lawyer that there’s still one heir left alive, a secret brother named Hans. Kate now has to learn who Hans is by exploring the town of Valadilène, then figure out just where he’s gone to and how to find him in order to have him sign away the factory. As she explores, she discovers that Hans was the creator of the Voralberg’s signature products, the automatons. A seemingly living one named Oscar may be the key to finding Hans, as he can drive a train Hans made that will one day lead him to the mysterious land of Syberia, where its said the last mammoths on Earth reside.

This first game really has a lot going on, and a lot of it doesn’t really get explained. The big thing that causes any of the story to happen is Hans finding a mammoth doll in a cave near his home as a child, which shows him visions of the beasts and instills the obsession with finding them. He also gains the ability to make automatons …via magical autism. Yes, really. Sokal is a talented writer, but he’s also constantly bad at portraying people who don’t exist within his day to life perspective. This partly stems from his pulp inspirations, where nuance is cast aside for big personalities or simple stereotypes to build from. He generally does a good job with this style, but a TON of his work is culturally outdated in a lot of different ways.

Syberia 1 and 2 both suffer from having characters with mental deficiencies or differences and the inability for the writing to tackle the subject. On one hand, these games do a good job at showing the difficulties autistic people deal with. Hans father becomes emotionally abusive when met with Hans’ changed thought processes, and he also suffers from a social awkwardness nobody in his time really knew anything about or how to deal with. On the other hand, the modern day Kate Walker treats a student at a university with the same condition like a child, and the story never really tackles the subject again (outside one professor using the R slur). If any commentary was intended, it never appears outside the first game, and it’s a mess there. As for 2, besides having Hans as a character in the flesh, we also have Igor. He’s a classic superhuman simpleton stereotype, even to the point that his mental state is key for solving a puzzle. Thank goodness Syberia 3 choice not to bring any of these ideas back, though it has its own problems inherited from 2.

As for the first game, it’s mainly structured as a tour through the life of Hans Voralberg, with Kate becoming fascinated by the worlds he’s visited and created. While the second game is probably the best title overall, the first game might have the most intriguing set-up and pacing. Valadilène is a ridiculously long segment, but it does a great job at gaining the audience’s interest. Looking into the history of the Voralbergs is long and involved, but you learn a lot both through journals and documents, and through the various sights you see. The automatons also seem magical in their rustic designs and their impressive display of movement. Starting the game with Anna’s funeral and seeing a small army of these follow mourners is a sight to behold, telling you from the start that you’re in for something special.

As you travel through the game, you find the different places Hans has touched with his work, and you also find that they’re all slowly dying off like he is – or already have. The Barrockstadt University is probably the best off, the school Hans attended and found the interest of a professor who was fascinated by Hans’ mammoth obsession. He’s also left some beautiful mammoth sculptures and a musical ordainment for the school, fitting well with the botanical garden that houses rare creatures from the Amerzone (heh, cute).

Things aren’t so nice in Komkolzgrad and Aralbad. The first area is an abandoned mine with long forgotten construction projects and even an abandoned space craft, populated only by a drunken cosmonaut and an obsessed celebrity stalker housed deep in the mines. The other area is home to an old soviet spa, one still in use but clearly crumbling and returning to the sea so close to it. These two areas may be the most beautiful parts of the entire series, perfectly capturing that desolate, almost nihilistic idea of the fragile nature of human works always trying to be conveyed in Sokal’s games. I can clearly remember almost the entirety of them, and they create one of the most memorable finales in gaming history.

Kate comes into these places to give the older generation some encouragement and the confidence to make one last hurrah they didn’t have in them anymore. You can help that old cosmonaut finally live his long lost dreams and make the launch, and you can help an old star do one last performance instead of rotting away in a decaying spa. That also leads to a steam/clockpunk opera in one of the damn coolest sequences ever put in any game ever. This becomes a reoccurring theme for the series, as Kate becomes the person who can give the dying generations the strength to make one last push and leave a mark, or maybe even survive into the modern age.

Kate herself has a great character arc through the game was well, told entirely with cell phone conversations. Through the chats she has with her boss, fiance, mother, and best friend, we learn a lot about Kate and her old life, and it’s nothing to be proud of. Kate’s life was privileged, but empty and meaningless. All of her friends and family don’t give a single poot about the incredible things she sees and tries to share with them, focusing entirely on their petty problems of getting to the theater or keeping pre-decided parties on track for the sake of public appearances. Kate’s fiance isn’t the least bit romantic or kind, her mother and best friend are self-obsessed, and I doubt I need to explain how she has issues with her bosses. Things wrap up with Kate’s fiance and best friend having a one night stand behind her back, and constantly bugging her about their feelings as she becomes completely uninterested with their selfish, shallow rantings. You really come to understand why Kate would want to leave this life and never return to live a harsh new existence in the colds of Eastern Europe. There is a sort of dumb-ass white person does dumb thing in there (with Syberia 3 playing with that a tad), but it sells it so well that you follow along anyways.

We also get to meet Oscar here, probably one of the most important characters in the series. He’s a sassy automaton (NEVER call him a robot) built to conduct Hans’ train. He’s constantly focused on the mission to the point he demands a ticket before he does anything, but as the series goes on, he becomes incredibly sympathetic and likable in his own right, the one person Kate can always count on and willing to sacrifice everything for her and Hans. He’s basically a relic carrying out a purpose he was made for in the first two games, but when he returns in the third, he’s finally a free soul and becomes Kate’s closest and truest companion. Thematically, though, Oscar is the old world trying desperately to survive in a world of increasing modernization. He’s the greatest accomplishment of those times, and its ultimate tool to keep surviving.

What keeps Syberia 1 from being something truly magical is the truly, truly awful puzzle design. The switch from first person in Amerzone to third person here means screens are bigger to shove in more detail, to show more of this mythical world the art team has created. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of screen to screen flow. There’s a lot of back tracking throughout the game, especially during the Barrockstadt segment, and getting from screen to screen can sometimes take an absurd amount of time. What makes Barrockstadt so egregious is all off the bloody stairs and the amount of backtracking. Whenever Kate uses any set of stairs, she sloooooooooowly either goes up or down them, every single time, and you have to go back and forth through these stairways all the time. Playing this segment without a guide is one of the most frustrating experiences imaginable, as the simple act of exploring becomes a time consuming chore with little to show for it. This segment also has a part where you have to go back and forth to report on the status of a train’s position to a boat tower that feels like it takes an eternity. All of the stair walking could be blamed for roughly 20% of the game’s play time, dead serious.

Otherwise, puzzles are fairly logical and easy to follow, or the pace dies as you mess around to figure out how to do the thing with the clockpunk machines Hans leaves around. There are also a lot of odd inclusions for gameplay, a common trait in Sokal’s work. The most forgivable might be Oscar demanding a ticket when there’s no need for it, simply because he’s designed to take tickets for train passengers. It’s a cute character moment, but it eats up eats up time pointlessly, coming off as padding. It’s not until the final segment you feel any significant urgency. The big issues aren’t technology limitations, but a failure to properly use the tech at hand. The second game fixes this.

With Syberia 2, the story continues right after the first, with Kate riding along with Hans on his long journey. However, Hans’ health is quickly declining, and the group have to stop in the small town of Romansburg to restock on coal. They attract the attention of two cartoonish brothers who wants to get to Syberia to steal mammoth tusks for ivory, while Kate does everything in her power to deal with them and keep Hans going for the last legs of the journey. Eventually, after traversing the wilderness of Russia, Kate reaches the village of the Youkol tribe, the natives that made that mammoth doll Hans became struck by so long ago. With their help, Kate and Hans can finally reach their destination and meet their destiny, though the shadow of Kate’s old life haunts her through a New York detective we see in side flashes.

Syberia 2 improves on the original’s pacing issues significantly. Since the two games were originally supposed to be one and had to be divided due to disk size issues, 2 benefits from the developers learning from some past mistakes, better puzzle design, and a greater sense of direction and momentum. You always have a good sense of what you’re supposed to do until the Youkol village slows things down, letting you see a bunch of different areas without any of them ever overstaying their welcome. There’s also now a bent towards much older architecture and the sights of the winter wilds, fitting the new angle of entering the uncharted old world. I’m not wild about Ivan and Igor, the comedy relief thief villains, especially Igor because of that whole comedic slow big guy thing, but they do add some energy to the story at points and keep it flowing in an engaging way.

Romansburg alone makes for a much stronger starting area than Valadilène. It’s overall smaller, but is still packed with detail. It also makes use of closer and more intimate camera angles, changing the atmosphere from wanderlust to focused. The game switches between these two styles when appropriate, and it results in a much more involving experience overall. Puzzles are also generally easy to understand, though the Youkol village is a massive momentum killer as the game returns to the first game’s figure it out slowly approach (though with much less time wasting animations, thankfully). It’s a good thing that the village is one of the most visually stunning areas in the whole game, or else this segment would be unforgivable.

Where the last game made you feel like an anthropologist, this one makes you feel like an explorer, and it fits well with the shift in focus. Hans is the real main character of the game, and Kate is just along for the ride, helping him reach his goal. Thus, she has to be the muscle now that she doesn’t have much left to research. The game benefits from Kate’s arc from the first game, allowing it to completely focus on Hans and Oscar instead, creating set-pieces for Kate to deal with in-between. It’s a much more exciting time on the whole, certainly not to action game standards, but a definite blockbuster for a point and click.

Thematically, the game leans much more into environmentalism, from the new focus of the art direction to the means Kate and Hans need to reach Syberia itself. Hans hasn’t done too much out here, so we see the natural world without his automatons. Lots of snow and trees litter the world, with middle age architecture and log cabins sprinkled about. This feels like a completely different land than the first game, one still ages behind and seemingly fine with it. The message is clear once you reach the Youkol village. The march of progress is ultimately futile without the preservation of the old, as we saw with Hans’ rusting wonders. To see the Youkols thriving so much in an ice cave of all places is quite the sight. The detective chasing Kate also disappears from the game due to his inability to deal with nature, a nice little symbolic touch.

This is all great, but Sokal’s use of native stereotyping and mysticism pulp plays a huge role in the game’s final hours. A major problem with portraying native cultures in fiction these days come from the effect colonial thought has had on western culture, and even some eastern cultures thanks to cultural osmosis (there are WAAAAAAY too many artists in Japan drawing 1920s black stereotypes). It’s become so normalized that few really stop and consider where these portrayals come from. This is how we end up with nearly every Native American character of the 90s and 00s in gaming be either a deus ex machina shaman or a feather wearing warrior with stilted speech. It’s a problem even the socially progressive Shadowrun games still struggle with a little. The youkols have the exact same problems, and even worse, they’re all designed to be pudgy short people. All of them.

The focus on trying to capture what is seen as the mythical power of nature through native tribes, commonly associated with naturalistic life styles, suffers from a complete lack of research or understanding of actual native tribes being shorthanded. The end result is a very dehumanizing set of characters that turn actual people into comedic relief and cartoonish silhouettes. For the entire series, even in the first where the youkols are only seen in drawing, this lazy stereotyping ends up weakening the entire narrative. It’s the one massive issue that holds back the entire franchise, and made the release of Syberia 3 in 2017 feel tone deaf.

Thankfully, the game ends with some rather strong moments revolving around Oscar revealing a depth to himself unexpected by that point. He chooses to sacrifice his body so Hans can use it as an exoskeleton and finish his journey, while Kate finally gets Hans through the last stretch and meets the mammoths with him. If the franchise had ended here, I would have been satisfied. Everything is wrapped up nice and tight. But Syberia made money, and a lot of it. A sequel would happen …eventually.

Sokal left Microids for awhile to run White Birds Productions, where the aforementioned Paradise and Sinking Island were made. Microids decided to go ahead with the project on their own, but behind the scenes shenanigans resulting in a lot of no starts. They even teased a crossover with the Still Life series at one point, but the incredibly dark tone of Still Life 2 ended up gaining mostly likely stopped those plans due to how incompatible the two franchises had become. Sokal came back eventually as his studio went under and wrote for Syberia 3 at long last. Unfortunately, when Syberia 3 finally released after about a decade of waiting, it did so completely broken.

Syberia 3 on release was a technical shit show, delayed countless times during development. The switch to Unity and the ridiculous production stuff behind the scenes resulted in a game optimized for consoles with almost unusable stiff controls, constant input lag, messy graphical issues, poorly thought out camera angles, game ending bugs, an auto-save system that enabled those game ending bugs to exist and become unavoidable, random transition freezes, and so on and so forth like so. When they finally got rid of the god awful default controls for a point and click interface, I suddenly found I could get past the first area of the game in half the time because I wasn’t constantly trying to angle Kate just right so she didn’t get stopped by an item in the area when doing the simple action of walking from point A to B. The new controls aren’t perfect, especially with the camera angles made for the old controls and awkward physics making Kate occasionally stick to objects, but at least the game was now playable.

Amazingly, the game takes a step back in several areas besides the technical skeleton, especially in voice acting. Microids games have always had bad English dubs, but in an enjoyable way. Actors tended to be hammy, and every character was played like the dumbest of stereotypes. It worked in the first two Syberia titles because of the pulp influence, but it’s bizarrely absent here when not talking to the youkols, who are more cringe educing at times than amusing. Most of the acting is flat, many actors not even attempting to do accents or even try to put some sort of emotion in their voice. The evil doctor woman you meet incredibly early in the game that acts as the central antagonist has a loud, cruel design, but her voice is just some random woman who I suspect might be an alien who does not understand our human emotions. Only a few returning actors stick out, mainly Sharon Mann as Kate and Kevin T. Collins as Oscar, sounding so comfortable in their roles that it’s like they never left. There’s also Mike Pollock, the voice of Doctor Eggman from the Sonic series, doing multiple characters, and doing them well and with a ton of ham. While his voice sticks out a bit with how samey it tends to be, he emotes more than any other actor in the game and steals every single scene.

The heavy focus on the youkols here magnifies the series worst problems, while introducing so many technical issues, but the weird thing is that I think this may be the best of the series in thematic content. Syberia 1 was mainly a mood piece, and 2 was an adventure yarn with the simplistic message of “modern society is totes lame.” 3 has a conflict from the start of the game, and there’s no lighthearted adventure to be had. It’s all about Kate trying to save the youkols from a militia who reject their natural lifestyles due to xenophobic paranoia and desires for Capitalist exploitation of their people and lands, while that detective from the second game returns and has some impact on the plot this time, mistaking Kate’s actions in the last two games as genuine criminal behavior. This is a Syberia game being written as the end of the world is constantly in the back of humanity’s subconscious, and while there’s plenty of amusing moments to be had, the villains are incredibly threatening and events more grim.

It’s pretty clear that Sokal has a lot of legitimate worries over what’s happening to the world. Native cultures are being swept away by authoritarian powers and the want for capital and national standing, people are becoming disconnected from their roots, and the simple, natural world is being overtaken by selfish desire and industrialization. We see rivers polluted just to punish the youkols for living the way they do. We see simple bridges thrown out for ridiculous tolls at borders. We discover that an entire segment of the youkols died effectively as slave labor to build a now abandoned Olympic stadium and hide their most precious temple from those who would decimate it for no reason beyond short sighted construction. We even get to see a city destroyed by a nuclear disaster, populated only by some dog automatons that will eventually power down without someone to wind them.

There’s something depressing about the sights Syberia 3 shows you, and it works perfectly for the story it crafts. What’s impressive about all this is that there’s still a sense of hope installed. We get to help people redeem themselves and start working towards the betterment of others, and we even see the odd person living in areas you’d never expect people to live. The fact there’s still a person living in a nuclear zone is kind of incredible. For all the doom and gloom the game throws to make you aware of these issues, we also see that humanity is not a species that will just quietly die out. The problem is our current world culture is so morally corrupt and selfish that it’s quickly bringing us closer to oblivion for the flimsiest of reasons. Oscar, the champion of our best of the old world, dies to save the youkols and preserve their ways, and his death was mostly because of nationalist fear of the other.

Oh, and the game ends with a cliffhanger.

The game that took over a decade to make, with one of the worst launches in gaming history, with a story about the dangers of hubris, ends on a cliffhanger.

Yeah.

Despite that, Syberia 3 is one of the most interesting Sokal works because it encompasses the best and worst of his writing, and reveals the most about his world view. Despite his blatant subconscious racism and massive misunderstandings of mental illness, Sokal is spot on with his commentary on the growth of society and the danger it has for us both culturally and naturally. The world is dying, there’s no way around this reality, but ignoring this problem for scapegoating our fellow humanity isn’t going to help anyone. In fact, it may be what damns us, because who’s going to save the world if we can’t even work together when it counts?

It’s actually kind of weird how much the guy lacks the ability to self-reflect while commenting on toxic cultural norms, but maybe that fits well with his equally problematic but fascinating work. Syberia is a mess of a franchise, but there’s really no other series like it and one worthy of respect and play. Though you should bring walkthroughs, especially in the first game. There’s only so much stair walking you need to do.