The Quest For The Clockwork Master

When I went to trade in those 360 games I had decided weren't for me, the store I visited didn't have any 360 games I wanted. Not at a price I was willing to pay, anyway. Maybe if they hadn't contended Super Street Fighter 4 was too scratched to accept. I like to think of that as the game's way of tormenting me. I won't futilely try to play it any longer, so it simply refuses to let itself be traded in. Sadistic.

I went with a pair of Original Recipe XBox games instead. One Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams, which I have now purchased on 3 separate occasions. I don't think I'll be trading it in to lower the price on some other game again. I picked it up because I'd never beaten the sub-mission, Made From A Wish, and I might want to play the main story again some time.

The other game was Syberia. It's described as an "adventure" game, though I tend to think of it as a "puzzle" game. My picture of "adventure" would involve more jumping and trap avoiding, less searching bookcases for the instructions on how to run an automaton assembly plant. I guess that's really an "action" game, though.

Syberia is one of those games where you explore a location, examining and collecting all sorts of different items, as you try to figure out what you have to do to advance the story. In this case, you're playing as Kate Walker, a lawyer from the U.S. who has come to the small French town of Valadilene to complete the sale of a small automaton factory to a giant toy company. Except the owner has just died, which was prepared for, except it turns out the owner's brother isn't dead, as has been believed for about 70 years. Which means Kate has to track this Hans Voralberg down, and get him to sign off on the papers. This takes her ever father east in a windup train which Hans designed, and his sister constructed for him. Hans wants to use the train to reach the distant land of Syberia, where he believes there are still live mammoths (he sustained a head injury trying to recover an ancient doll mammoth as a child, which might explain the fixation on mammoths). Kate just wants to get the paperwork signed and go home to her demanding fiance and asshole boss. Then again. . .

Something the game does very well is build the sense of exploration and, dare I say it, adventure. As it progressed, I was drawn in, and left wanting to know more about this world. Based on Kate's phone conversations with her friends and loved ones, the U.S. sounds pretty much as we know it. But everywhere Kate goes, things seem to be dying. The university at Barrockstadt sits near ruined buildings, and is protected by a massive wall. What, exactly, they need protection from, is unclear, but I want to know. I want Kate to keep going so I can learn more. Which means I have to keep playing, because I'm the one controlling her.

What's smart about it is that Kate grows to feel the same way. She views some of the hoops she has to jump through to get things done frustrating (like me), but she also finds the whole thing kind of cool. It helps me to feel invested in Kate as a character. When she complains, it's probably about something that bothered me. When she's strangely nonplussed by some rough news her best friend gives her, well, I'd seen it coming for awhile, so I wasn't surprised, either. Since it's a 3rd-person perspective game, it's like I'm tagging along with Kate, so we share the highs and lows.

About those hoops, though. It's probably a nature of the game, but the path to success can be a convoluted one. In Barrockstadt, Kate has to talk to the station master, then talk to him again, then talk to the chief paleontologist, then the rectors, then the station master again, just to get access to a private garden that has some grapes she needs. This is made more annoying by the time it takes to get from one person to the next. Kate's not a very fast runner, and you have to press the A button when near the stairs to get her to go up or down them. She also has to be standing still; you can't try to hit A while still approaching the stairs, which is a bit of a nuisance.

Some of the puzzles are more interesting than others, varying from helping a cosmonaut fake a blood test, to mixing it an alcoholic beverage (not for the person who needed blood testing, mind you). The controls are a little finicky. Sometimes it seems there's only one particular place you can stand for the interaction symbol to appear or a given object. You might walk right up next to it, and not be able to do a thing, because you need to be standing 5 feet behind it and to the right. Little frustrating. I don't know, some of the control issues might be my controller. After 9+ years, the top of the left joystick is starting to disintegrate.

The dialogue is pretty good. Each character tends to have a distinct voice and personality, though there were some curious choices on accents. Why the head of a Russian spa has a British accent I don't know. They did make a bit of a joke of this with the tug captain, who speaks some mixture of about 5 different languages. I know I say some French, Russian, and German in there, along with some other non-English ones I don't know. Fortunately, his wife can translate, though she has a bit of a Russian accent. I'd also say the voice actors had some fun with it, especially whoever was doing the rectors. Their stuffy attitudes and sniping at each other over protocol or differences of opinion can be pretty funny, depending on how much of a hurry I'm in.

The landscapes are beautiful, if a little flat. What you're able to interact with is fairly limited in any given screen, and so most things don't aren't given as much depth, since they aren't supposed to move or react. The character movements are also fairly stiff, but most of what we see is people walking, or maybe pulling a lever, so I guess they didn't feel they needed motion capture to work from.

The story itself ends with finding Hans Voralberg, but his quest is picked up in the sequel, which I haven't bought yet. I feel as though after my complaints about how Rage ended, I should be more annoyed by that. Somehow, I'm not. Because the game, from very early on, makes it clear Kate is supposed to find Hans. That's her quest. We aren't even totally sure what Hans is up to or where he is until the end. Also, there's never any sense from the game you shouldn't track him down. Kate wants to do it, from a sense of duty if nothing else. Her boss is after her, her fiance is after he to wrap it up so she can come home. Rage spent the first third of the game telling me to avoid the Authority, then it shoves me into the Resistance where I have to fight them. Then it doesn't provide any sort of satisfactory conclusion to the conflict with the Authority. Meanwhile, Syberia has Kate find Hans, complete her job, and then she makes the decision to keep going into the sequel. What's more, like I said, I wanted to see more of this world, so I wanted Kate to keep going, whereas I never wanted any part of the Resistance in Rage.

So Syberia, despite some frustrating gameplay aspects, sucked me in with the storytelling and world building, and I think I probably will pick up the sequel at some point.