The Doctor does not play puzzle-adventure games because they are “relaxing.” The Doctor plays them because there is something deeply satisfying about a clockpunk automaton named Oscar following you across half of Europe on a train powered by sheer mechanical stubbornness. Syberia, Benoît Sokal’s masterwork of wind-up melancholy, has been given the full remaster treatment, and the updated version is sitting right there on Steam judging you for every FPS-bro game you bought instead.

If you somehow missed the original: you play as Kate Walker, a Manhattan lawyer who arrives in a tiny Alpine village to finalize a factory acquisition, only to discover the inventor she’s looking for has wandered off on a quixotic mission involving woolly mammoths and a place called Syberia. The world Sokal built is ClockPunk in its bones: brass automatons, hand-wound mechanisms, a whole civilization built on springs and ingenuity instead of steam or diesel. It is gorgeous and a little heartbreaking and it has absolutely zero exploding helicopters, which is the correct amount. Oscar, the automaton companion, remains one of the better written non-human characters in gaming, and I will not be taking questions on this point.

The Omega7Red Formulae declares this one ΩΩΩΩ½. If you have never played it, the remaster is the version to start with. If you have played it, you already know. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a good clockwork train comes close.

Via: Steam

[Narrator Voice-Over] In a time…  of post-apocalyptic destruction.  Mechanical ragdolls have risen from the ashes of the old world to replace mankind.  But in the darkness lies an evil robot monster that feeds on the souls of slain ragdolls.  Only ragdoll #9 is left to fight alone in a desperate attempt to save their dystopia, and free the undead.

This is now a big-budget film with Tim Burton’s name stamped on it.  It was based on a short film of the same name.  The little mechanical ragdolls are cool.  The big movie website, and the original short-film on YouTube.  The plot (Wiki) is compelling, and the movie trailer makes it look very interesting.  I’m certainly going to see this on the big screen.  Oh, and watch the above trailer all the way through, because there are two of them one after another.

Without a doubt, my favorite type of video game is Adventure.  Hours of hunting for the exact correct pixel to click on so that I can solve the friggin puzzle at last and move on with the plot.  I’ve played them for years, and I think I’ve played most of them, from King’s Quest on.  Most of us are now into Xbox 360 Xbox One modern gaming console 1st person shooters like Gears of War (including me), and the often-overlooked Adventure type of game is slowly dying out.  But, if you’re ever going to play an Adventure game, Syberia is the one to play.  It came out in 2002 and is simply the best game of its type ever produced, even today in 2022.

What might interest you is the game’s environment.  Beautifully rendered artful backgrounds, a clockwork train (it winds up), mechanical automatons, gears, springs, airships, dystopias, all presented in a well-thought-out and compelling story.  The game is challenging, but not so much that you need to turn to a walk-through.

Available for the PC, Original Xbox, and recently the Nintendo DS.  Play it on GameTap (or similar service), or get it and load it into a virtual machine like Microsoft’s VirtualPC or VMware.  Official home page with screenshots and videos: http://www.syberia-series.com/en/ [defunct]  Also, stay away from the sequel Siberia II, it wasn’t all that good.