Title: Syberia
Genre: Adventure
Big Word: Dysbelief
Strap: John Walker Gets Half Decent Game To Review Shocker

I’m not sure if my heart can take it. I’m all confused. One second the world appears to fit together, the next, it all falls apart. The game arrives, it’s been aimed at a French market, it’s from the recently deceased Microids, and hey, it’s an adventure game in the twentieth century – there really isn’t any room for doubt. It should suck. Surely?

It gets more impossible. Here’s the pitch: you play a New York lawyer, visiting a small French town to sign a deal to buy a clockwork toy factory – but it seems there’s an heir somewhere, and your job is to follow the trail of clockwork clues leading you towards him. Every single outward symptom of the epidemic disease that sweeps through the adventuring community is there. No doctor in the land would offer even a glimpse of hope.

And yet, glimpse.

Syberia is, wait for it, not that bad. In a world that hadn’t contained Broken Sword, The Longest Journey, and Gabriel Knight, you could go so far as to call it… good. I can justify these radical claims, honestly I can.

Without any room for doubt, Syberia is by far and away the best looking adventure game ever created. Every single background is so lovingly painted that you wonder if it’s an enhanced photograph, but realise it isn’t when you see a flock of birds fly overhead, and the waterwheel gently turning in the distance. And you realise that it’s far prettier than any photograph could ever be. And living inside these breath-thieving sets are near-flawless 3D character models, with intricately detailed faces, clothes, and movement. Let there be no mistake – this is a gorgeous, gorgeous looking game.

But as we all know, it’s personality that counts: The apparently twee story opener immediately reveals itself to be a tragic tale of a broken family, and their secrets that have remained hidden until the very recent death of your client. You are charged with the responsibility of seeking the missing son, and heir to the town’s most important industry, across various semi-realistic scenarios. In a proper point and click environment. Score.

Even the puzzles work. It occasionally slips into the annoying wild goose chase mentality, but aside from this, challenges are pleasingly old-fashioned – a bit daft, in that lateral-logical way. Get the test-tube holder to get the egg to balance the scales to start the bandstand. That sort of thing.