Syberia II

After the first Syberia, I didn’t think playing an older game without a remaster would be a problem for me. But Syberia 2 made me realize how necessary those quality-of-life improvements actually were. Playing this without a guide feels like you either need to be a genius or you need to constantly backtrack, recheck places you already checked, and try random things until something works. The puzzles feel much more disconnected this time. Sometimes I knew what I needed to do, but if I missed even one tiny object somewhere, I basically had to go through every old area again. Even worse, sometimes the game doesn’t place an item somewhere until you trigger something else first, so getting stuck often means checking the entire map again just to see if the game secretly added something. Very fun. Love having my time gently stolen. That feeling is not only in the puzzles either. The story also keeps interrupting the main journey with random obstacles. To be fair, some of these parts were nice, but overall it started to feel like the game kept stopping us for pretty weak reasons. After a while, I just wanted to move forward without the journey being delayed every five minutes. The things Syberia 2 does well are mostly the same things the first game did well. The atmosphere, story style, and general charm are still there. But sadly, I couldn’t even finish the game properly. After playing for around 4.5 hours, the game crashed and I found out there was no autosave like in the first one. At that point, I had zero motivation to replay everything, so I just looked up the rest of the story online. Overall, Syberia 2 still has some good parts, but the frustrating puzzle logic, constant backtracking, and lack of basic quality-of-life features dragged it down a lot for me. 5/10 - Average.