Syberia The World Before PS5 Xbox Series: still the reference adventure video game for fans of the genre?

A new gen version that is fun! (By Meakaya)

If there’s one genre that’s very PC-centric, it’s point’n’click. This is why console ports can sometimes be disappointing. Fortunately, this is not the case with Syberia: The World Before. Initially released last March on PC only, the new title of the license imagined by the late Benoît Sokal has offered a new version on PS5 and Xbox Series, and this for our greatest pleasure. The opportunity to open the title to a new audience, who can strangely discover the title in its best light. Thanks to its more modern adventure game aspect (while feeling good the point’n’click of yesteryear), Syberia: The World Before is indeed a game that turns out to be even more pleasant joystick in hand (which was already possible on the PC version by the way).

Indeed, the interactions have been adapted to the sticks of the controller to provide us with a more immersive and pleasant gameplay. Add to that the famous haptic feedback on PS5 and you get a gripping dive into the skin of Kate Walker and Dana Roze. There are still some inaccuracies in terms of interactions, movements and the camera, but nothing to spoil the experience. Overall, the game runs very well on next-gen consoles. Since Syberia: The World Before is savored like a good film, it is therefore a pleasure to be able to play it with so much fluidity with your buttocks screwed on your sofa. For the rest, we find what had made the quality of the title: visuals as beautiful as on PC, an always pleasant scenario, pleasant puzzles for the most part, a soundtrack with small onions and a steampunk atmosphere apart. Without a doubt, this new version will delight fans of the license and neophytes looking for new adventures.

Original Syberia The World Before review by 87, dated 03/20/2022

Two rooms, two atmospheres

Things aren’t particularly good for Kate Walker at the start of Syberia: The World Before. Locked up in jails in the heart of a salt mine in which she works until exhaustion, the adventurer luckily finds an opportunity to escape very quickly. By some fortuitous events, Kate will discover a painting forgotten for decades, on which appears the portrait of a woman whom everyone tells her looks terribly like her. Although quite desperate and in the grip of personal and family torment, Kate goes in search of this young girl of whom for the time being she knows nothing. That person is Dana Roze. Living with her parents in the fictional European town of Vaghen in the late 1930s, she mainly aspired to become a professional pianist. Rather of the dreamy type, Dana is not indifferent to the rise of a fascist group called L’Ombre Brune, which no longer hesitates to flaunt its extremism not far from the outbreak of the Second World War. .

These two different time slots will allow you to incarnate Kate in her attempt to lift the mystery about the identity of the young girl, as well as Dana who will have to face the threat of the Dark Shadow, while compiling with her musical ambitions. This gives a certain appeal to a rather well-crafted scenario, although leading to a finale that is a bit rushed, which will allow you to travel and evolve in environments that are often very pretty and diversified. If the tone is undoubtedly darker than what the series had accustomed us to so far, a few lighter moments come to soften the atmosphere a little, in particular thanks to the crisp tandem Kate / Oscar) (whose return and appearance we particularly appreciate). If, overall, the different dialogues and situations ring true and the story follows with as much pleasure as interest, this episode of Syberia does not avoid a few slightly Manichean clichés, where the good guys are very nice and the bad guys very wicked. If this may offend newcomers to the world of Syberia, others will know that it is often benevolence that prevails in the saga, so you will not be surprised to be mostly surrounded by characters as endearing as they are compassionate .

Without revealing too much to you, however, we will issue a small caveat on the presence of a secondary plot but connected to the main one, more exotic, which ultimately serves the story quite little and which we feel could have been exploited more. Know to finish that if it is recommended to know the previous episodes to better understand the stakes of this new Syberia, Kate and certain documents proposed in game are sufficiently loquacious so that you do not have too much difficulty to hang up the wagons, this which wouldn’t stop you from enjoying the story of this episode for what it is anyway.

Accessible and coherent puzzles

Your adventure will therefore take place on several timelines, we will not tell you exactly how many to spare the surprise, but know that you will have the opportunity at times to manually switch between controlling Dana and controlling Kate, and more, because observing places in one time allows you to progress in the other. This gives rise to quite nice puzzles and rather well felt from a narrative point of view because for the most part very coherent. And puzzles, since we’re talking about them, are an essential part of Syberia and The World Before is no exception to the rule.

The game is divided into several fairly linear areas, which will offer you the possibility of interacting with objects, observing certain decorative elements more closely or speaking with some PnJs. Most collectables need to be manipulated and observed for you to be sure of their function, and you can of course combine them with other items if the puzzle allows. If you won’t have to look for a challenge in this episode, count on the game to submit you pleasant, original and coherent puzzles. No “capillotraction” here, each puzzle helping to progress being perfectly integrated into the story. And if by chance you were stuck on an enigma, the title offers a compartmentalized help system materialized in the form of several gauges, which require a short waiting time to be activated. When one of the gauges is filled, a fairly general first clue is revealed to you. At this time, the gauge of another more precise clue fills up and you can dispose of it after a few seconds. This will “force” you to try to figure out the mechanics of a puzzle on your own thanks to a first clue, and if you still get stuck, you can take advantage with a little patience of new elements aimed at enlightening your lanterns. .

Technically finally up to his point?

In terms of handling, we expected Syberia The World Before to be more flexible and fluid than its predecessor, and this is in fact the case. On the mouse keyboard, you can simply click to move Kate or Dana, and double click to activate the running step. Certainly not everything is perfect: clicking on an interactive element will sometimes trigger movements rather than interactions and some camera failures make navigation laborious, especially when it comes to rushing into a corridor or an alley. In addition, the fact of constantly having to click on the “back” button to return, for example, from your inventory to the game is quite unintuitive where a simple right click would have made things more fluid. But on the whole, The World Before comes out of it much better than its elder and reconnects with the feelings of the point’n click of yesteryear.

Finally, on the technical side, we feel that the teams have learned from the mistakes of the past and without doubt the large postponement of the game was beneficial for The World Before. In addition to the fact that the game is frankly pretty, in particular thanks to an inspired use of lighting sublimating the universe so characteristic of Sokal, the whole is less buggy than before, even if we regret body or facial animations always a a little too rigid compared to certain current standards. Also note that the game encounters real optimization problems on PC, when all sliders are pushed to the maximum, even on machines equipped with hardware higher than the (greedy) recommended configuration. Not enough to sulk its pleasure for all that, because Syberia The World Before revives the standards of the saga, and will embark you for more than 10 hours in an adventure apart, in the heart of a universe which is not less.

Conclusion

After a third episode which made us fear the worst for the future of Syberia, The World Before manages to prove that the license still has things to tell and an uchronic and dreamlike universe to exploit. For more than 10 hours, you will enjoy taking the fate of Dana and Kate into your own hands, solving accessible and coherent puzzles and losing yourself in the poetry that emerges from the world created by Benoît Sokal. If we can rail against certain inaccuracies between interactions and movements, a few camera failures or a PC optimization not necessarily developed, fans and newcomers alike will undoubtedly appreciate this somewhat old-fashioned adventure, of course, but which finally puts its suitcases in modernity and which could, if the stars are aligned, have a new future in front of it and thus perpetuate the memory and the universe of its main architect.