Syberia – Remastered Review – Old Wine, Newish Bottle

Syberia – Remastered Review

For gamers unaware of its history, the late developer Benoît Sokal’s Syberia was one of the many post-Myst point-and-click puzzle adventure games. Unlike the classic early 1990s adventures — think The Secret of Monkey Island — Myst and its imitators had “photorealistic” graphics and a more serious tone. Puzzles often hinged on activating machinery and could be frustratingly obtuse. 2002’s Syberia was definitely in that wheelhouse, with a gear punk setting and offbeat narrative. Syberia gained a strong following in its day, with several sequels. Now the game has been remastered for contemporary audiences.

Creaky Gears

Syberia spins a tale about a New York lawyer named Kate Walker. She’s sent to a fictional village in the French Alps to find inventor Hans Voralberg. He needs to sign off on the sale of an automaton factory in the town. This assignment sends Kate on an extended journey through Eastern Europe. Voralberg is an eccentric fellow, believing that the island of Syberia holds the last living mammoths. Kate is accompanied by Oscar, one of Voralberg’s automatons. Kate’s introduction to the village is watching an automaton procession winding its broken way through the town. It’s an evocative, unsettling, and surreal image.

Following that introduction, Kate begins to explore the town, meet its sometimes quirky inhabitants, and gather information about Voralberg. Syberia makes a few significant changes to the original, but doesn’t touch the narrative or characters. Unfortunately, it also misses a chance to improve the game’s sometimes glacial pace and time-wasting backtracking. To be fair, these problems still exist in recent puzzle adventure games.

Puzzle Solving

If you’re a fan of the original, you probably want to know what’s new. The original’s static environments and fixed camera have been replaced by fully 3D graphics and a rotatable camera. Visually, nearly everything has been improved, including textures and a significant upgrade to lighting and weather effects. I wouldn’t say it looks like a game from 2025, but it’s a huge change from the 2002 original.

That said, not everything looks great. For starters, the original’s many cutscenes have been upscaled but not remade. They look washed out and pretty primitive, and it feels a little weird that they weren’t remade entirely. Overall, character models — the human ones, anyway — remain several steps behind the curve. I don’t know if the voice acting has been remade, but the quality is all over the map. Kate in particular lacks energy and range in her delivery.

The art, design, and architecture remain impressive, and it’s nice to see greater textural detail and have the ability to explore a bit more. The world is not particularly alive, and it still feels like a series of stages, but better looking ones at least.

Motor Heads

When it comes to puzzles, Syberia’s are squarely in the middle between easy and impossibly obtuse. The original had one or two infuriating puzzles, but they’ve been redesigned to offer more guidance without outright handing the player the solutions. The game has a guided mode that helps the player along, and an unguided mode that offers little direction.

Still, many of Syberia’s puzzles still fall under the category of simple but game-padding busywork. I have a personal prejudice against busywork, immersion-breaking puzzles, like having to find a key to wind a mechanism to simply ring the hotel’s front desk bell. The gear punk conceit provides plenty of machine-focused puzzles, which means a lot of time scouring the environment for clues and parts.

Syberia’s setting and narrative premise were interesting in 2002, and remain so in Syberia Remastered. Thanks to its improved visuals and several quality-of-life features, modern gamers should find it accessible. Unfortunately, the game’s pacing, unadulterated cutscenes, and overall approach to puzzles mean that some parts of Syberia Remastered feel stuck in the past. Fans of the original will enjoy revisiting this new version, but I’m not sure if new gamers will be quite as engaged.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***