I'm not going to fault Syberia for its pacing or its Guide Dang It puzzles or its demand to hunt pixels. I used to play Sierra games back in the day and Syberia is an artifact of its time, which makes it rather slow, linear, and obtuse from a modern viewpoint.

No, what bugs me about Syberia is its savoir faire. It has a style, and that's fine... but when that style is built with backstory and plot to basically make a Gary Stu the most important man in the world, where everyone must love him if they have a soul, and everyone /does/ love him because he's so special... that bugs me. Okay, so there's a guy who's such a mechanical genius that he can make mechanical life. Fine. But then he makes all his mechanisms toys because he's simple, you see, he's so innocent and pure. If that's not saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt, the developers start to assume you're some sort of mouthbreather and actually spell it out for you: he is pure and innocent and just and kind and has never done anything wrong ever, in pretty much so many words.

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer by trade, but the game smacks of an alternate history wondering why we couldn't all be more innocent. Why couldn't our society be made by toymakers with quaint clockwork mechanisms running everything? Others have spoken about how the game is anti-American; I think it's more anti-modern since it hails back to pastoral scenes in rural towns and, of course, the clockwork... yet as much as they say that the Good Old Days were so great, said Good Old Days never were and the clockwork fantasy underlines that they don't even want to sacrifice anything for the Good Old Days. We want our toymaker utopia, but with faster, better trains and /artificial life/ slave labor. I've no time for backwards-looking utopias, since the past wasn't as great as everyone makes it out to be. I've got even less time than that for backwards-looking utopias that want all of the benefits of technological society without any of its drawbacks, because mechanical magic will somehow keep the spring-loaded spaceships from being missiles or the wind-up automatons from being soldiers or the super-fast super-green trains from being tanks.

I'm not going to fault Syberia for its pacing or its Guide Dang It puzzles or its demand to hunt pixels. I used to play Sierra games back in the day and Syberia is an artifact of its time, which makes it rather slow, linear, and obtuse from a modern viewpoint. No, what bugs me about Syberia is its savoir faire. It has a style, and that's fine... but when that style is built with backstory and plot to basically make a Gary Stu the most important man in the world, where everyone must love him if they have a soul, and everyone /does/ love him because he's so special... that bugs me. Okay, so there's a guy who's such a mechanical genius that he can make mechanical life. Fine. But then he makes all his mechanisms toys because he's simple, you see, he's so innocent and pure. If that's not saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt, the developers start to assume you're some sort of mouthbreather and actually spell it out for you: he is pure and innocent and just and kind and has never done anything wrong ever, in pretty much so many words. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer by trade, but the game smacks of an alternate history wondering why we couldn't all be more innocent. Why couldn't our society be made by toymakers with quaint clockwork mechanisms running everything? Others have spoken about how the game is anti-American; I think it's more anti-modern since it hails back to pastoral scenes in rural towns and, of course, the clockwork... yet as much as they say that the Good Old Days were so great, said Good Old Days never were and the clockwork fantasy underlines that they don't even want to sacrifice anything for the Good Old Days. We want our toymaker utopia, but with faster, better trains and /artificial life/ slave labor. I've no time for backwards-looking utopias, since the past wasn't as great as everyone makes it out to be. I've got even less time than that for backwards-looking utopias that want all of the benefits of technological society without any of its drawbacks, because mechanical magic will somehow keep the spring-loaded spaceships from being missiles or the wind-up automatons from being soldiers or the super-fast super-green trains from being tanks.