If you were to combine the visuals of
Myst with the puzzle-solving adventures of the
King's Quest series, you'd be smack dab in the middle of the gameplay content of
Syberia. Not your typical starring adventure character, Kate Walker is actually just a lawyer sent on a mission to close a deal for her law firm. Little did she know that this deal would end up having her scour the countryside, solving multiple puzzles, while searching for the answers she needs to close this case and find the rightful heir to an automaton factory.
As Kate Walker, you must talk with many characters, and essentially do their bidding (often in the form of fetching and retrieving) in order to progress through the game of Syberia. But this isn't your typical 3rd-person adventure game. Instead of plugging in a controller, you only need grab your mouse and dive right in. Essentially, Syberia takes advantage of it's point-and-click interface by allowing the user to mouse-over objects to interact with them. This interface makes jumping into the game extremely easy, but it's not without its problems.
You see, even though the mouse cursor changes shape when hovering over interactive objects, these objects are not always that easy to see from the start. It's this realization that will most likely lead you to do what I did, and constantly move the mouse around the entire area of each and every separate screen. This gets annoying, as it would have been much simpler had the interactive objects 'stuck out' better, naturally leading your eyes to them on the screen. A slight twinkle coming from a metal key, or a more defined switch, for example, would have turned this average game into an extremely fun campaign.
