Syberia II is out! At long last! The first game was an arbitrary scavenger hunt that forced you back and forth across an Alpine village that became less charming with each traversal.

I played the demo of the sequel last night. After walking along some crisply rendered mountain paths along tracks without choices, you and your dog come upon a mansion. Inside you pixel hunt until you find a book. It’s boring. But you need to know that golden salmon eat green frogs and swim downstream from waterfalls. You go in the only direction you’re allowed, through the mansion and onto a dock downstreadm from a waterfall. There’s a fishing rod and a tacklebox. Bait the line with the green lure, cast it into the water, and watch the charming animation as your character reels in a fish. Is it a golden salmon? Too small to tell. The animation finishes with you unhooking the fish, putting it on the dock, and then chastising the dog who eats it. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you off by a few pixels in where you’re casting? Do you need to use lures in some particular order? Is the program wired so that the Big Event — you catch a fish, you hook a tire, you beat the freaking dog senseless with the boring fishing book — occurs on the sixth try? Was there some magic berry you didn’t notice when you were running through the mountains nine screens ago? Did you give up caring twenty minutes ago?

Ah, Syberia! Taking the adventure out of adventure games.

Tron 2, on the other hand, is actually pretty good. The game is fun to play, with an occasional exit too hard to find and an occasional enemy too hard to beat. That’s why we have cheats and walkthroughs, bless their hearts. But it’s imaginative, occasionally funny, and the graphics are consistently astounding: original and sometimes beautiful.

Categories: misc dw