Syberia: Remastered is a great story that takes a bit of a jog to get through

So here's the thing, I love point and clicks. Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Myst. I love the Remasters too. I thought Myst in VR was insane (except that awful minecart bit but that was terrible before). I have the Blade Runner Remaster on my Switch that, despite being really flawed, is a really neat story. Remasters can work.

But here's the thing, some games aren't built for remasters, they need to be rebuilt completely and Syberia is one of those games. I played the original back in 2002 when I was a fledgling sometimes gutter punk. I loved it. The concept of a town creating a series of artificial intelligences to do things for them, making them realistically human as possible, and then immediately treating them terribly is...well...very human. And something that mirrors a lot happening today.

There's an issue when remaking this though. And I'm not just talking about the fact that this game has a female protagonist from the turn of the century meaning that she cannot walk without swaying her hips as if to ward off unseen attackers.

This game is the tiniest game in a giant world I've ever seen. The puzzles can often be very simple. "Oh, I need this ticket stamped by a notary." You remember there was a little puzzle on a desk at the mayor's office that, when solved, created a tiny machine that stamped small papers. The solution is easy. But to get there you have to run through about several long walkways and areas of streets and cities filled with nothing intractable. Essentially slowly scrolling through a prerendered JPG. And that's IF you know where you're going.

This entire street goes for blocks and has two doors you can interact with and one NPC who is only there to tell you his store is closed.

Early in the game you're tasked with speaking with a notary about the terms of a deed so that your corporate bosses could have access to a dead person's belongings. Stay with me. So you leave the hotel you're staying at and have to go to see the notary gent. They tell you to go see the notary. Period.

Imagine if I dropped you off somewhere, in another state, or city, where despite everyone speaking your language, you couldn't ask relevant questions. And all you knew you had to do was go to the notary. But you have no Google Maps or anything. You have no idea.

I spent 40 minutes trying to get to the notary. Outside the hotel is a long street filled with door after door after door of unaccessible housing you cannot interact with. No signs or labels or anything save for one gentleman on this massive empty city street who tells you you're not allowed into the bakery. Don't worry, the bakery will never be relevant. But I tried so many doors that, eventually, I took it as a hint that they weren't going to let me into any of the buildings.

Truth of the matter is, about three-four blocks down the road there's one door in a building with several doors that actually HAD the door I needed to go in. I figured it out by...watching someone else play the game, yelling a good ol' Bob Odenkirk style "goddamnit", and copying the actions.

A lot of this game is you running for BLOCKS through empty, stone silent environments, desperately trying to find things you can interact with by running around and smashing your interact button. Because the game is weird when it comes to puzzles. Did you run into an elevator that you can't operate because you don't have the necessary item to fit into the clear box outside it? Maybe that's because you didn't decide to interact with the table earlier an autistic coded kid (the game datedly keeps calling slow) ran away from enough time to find four gears randomly lying about on the table a few pixels large?

Shown in this scene: Four very tiny cogs you need to find despite NEVER being told there would be cogs here for something half a mile away.

Again. This is nothing against the original. For 2002 is was fine. The story is actually pretty cool and has some wild elements to it and the world it created is really inventive. But this is why a remake is sometimes needed over a remaster because quality of life features would have made this game SO much better. Fast Travel, a "highlight interactables" feature, things like that.

Maybe if I hadn't played the original and the story was more surprising to me the problems with the movement and the long jogs would have hit different, but if you've experienced the story before, this might be a tough remastered to play through.