Ladders in particular got very annoying as the scene only cuts after Kate climbs around four to six rungs, with no way to skip any intermediate scenes. Kate’s run feels like a brisk walk when it is possible and the repositioning to climb stairs or ladders can be tedious to watch. Movement, as somewhat alluded to earlier, is slow. Some puzzles can be completed slightly out of sequence, which is neat but does feel weirdly stilted from a narrative perspective. There were several times when I knew what I needed to do but not what specific NPC conversations I would need to have in order for Kate to understand what needed to be done. It’s hard to tell what is interactable at a glance and what will become interactable with story progress. Kate’s animations are slow to trigger at times, making movement and backtracking a chore. The game, however, is not exactly crisp or clear. On that 1024x768 screen with 800圆00 artwork, the image remains crisp and clear. Rather than mess around with any scaling settings in my graphics card drivers or installing a wrapper program, I pulled out a 4:3 LCD monitor my aunt had planned on sending to an e-cycling facility (if you’re reading this, hi Deb) and made it the primary display. The game seemingly has not received any major engine revisions on PC since launch and all the graphics are hardcoded to a 4:3 aspect ratio. Syberia (retroactively Syberia 1, henceforth S1) is graphically pleasant to look at even today, assuming you aren’t viewing it stretched from its native size to a modern widescreen monitor. This work of writing is a rough encapsulation of my thoughts a day or two after beating the second one. Wanting to learn more about the backstory, I finally installed the first game, played through it to completion over a week, and instantly installed the second game, completing it in a couple days. With this jolt of recognition I downloaded the demo for the fourth title and was instantly enthralled in this slightly-parallel world. I mostly forgot about the titles until Gamescom’s Opening Night Live gave the (forthcoming as of the time of this writing) fourth game their “PC Game of the Year” award. The second game joined that list through a GOG giveaway of the two games, languishing untouched. However the first learning happened, I eventually got the game through a Twitch Prime giveaway and it joined the long list of games I own but never played. Or maybe it was some other incident entirely, a random Wikipedia browsing bringing my attention to another tangentially related adventure game. Maybe it was when I was on my tablet under the bedsheets in the dark of my shared bedroom, checking out games what looked kinda neato. Maybe it was when I got a DS and a flash cart, browsing for whatever cool roms I could find. I don’t remember when I first became aware of Syberia, or how it got the reputation in my mind of “that third-person point-and-click adventure game what has really pretty graphics”. If this idea ends up being bad I’ll revise the premise somewhat but for now, the first review of Septventure. This is intended as the first installment in what will hopefully become a series on various adventure games, published throughout the month of September. Septventure 2021’s first installment (or 1,153 word on Syberia 1 and 2)
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