Syberia – Remastered Review: Like Clockwork

What was your first adventure game? For some, their first experience in the adventure niche will have been the 2002 steampunk gem Syberia, offering equal parts clockwork, charm, and clunkiness — and the 2025 remaster offers a fresh look at this beloved title.

Below, you’ll find Adventure Gamers’ full, spoiler-free review of Syberia – Remastered, looking at everything from the story and the core gameplay loop to the visuals and voice acting. This review was completed on a PC.

A City of Whirring Cogs And Bricks

Syberia – Remastered places you in the shoes of Kate Walker, a lawyer who’s been sent to a village in the French Alps to secure the sale of a toy factory. Once she arrives, she discovers that things aren’t going to be as easy as she’d hoped – sending her on a mission to track down a genius inventor.

Fans of the original Syberia will know what to expect from the narrative, but for the sake of fellow new fans, I’ll keep the commentary on the story relatively vague.

It rumbled along at a slow cadence, but it still felt consistently interesting throughout. I wanted to solve each mystery that the game threw my way, and each time a new character was introduced, I was eager to learn more about them.

Exploring the village also rewarded me with lore tidbits, which I’m always a fan of with adventure games. A good adventure game should, in my opinion, incentivize looking around the world and investigating every corner, and Syberia – Remastered did this nicely.

I never got the chance to play the original Syberia — although I’ll be nabbing a copy as soon as I’ve wrapped up this review — so I can’t comment too heavily on its faithfulness to the original. As a new player, the story felt intriguing and suitably mysterious, with a wide variety of interesting people to meet as I explored.

The “interesting character” definition doesn’t apply to the protagonist, admittedly; I found Kate Walker to be somewhat beige in contrast to the other leading character.

That’s not a slight on the voice acting, though. Something that stood out during my time with Syberia – Remastered was the quality of the music and the sound design. The voice acting for each character, Kate included, felt lively, and it greatly added to my immersion overall.

A Relaxed, Intriguing Experience

Playing through Syberia – Remastered never felt tense or stressful; it was a relaxed, slower-paced experience that felt like a wonderful homage to the golden age of point-and-click adventure games.

In terms of puzzles, they felt reasonably engaging but never overly challenging. Newer fans of the point-and-click puzzle genre should be able to work through them without too much difficulty, but veteran players should still get plenty of enjoyment out of them, particularly if they play on the difficulty setting that doesn’t provide quest objectives.

I was pleasantly surprised to see two difficulty modes — story and adventure. The story difficulty setting included quest objectives, while the adventure setting did not. Long-time fans of the genre should play with the latter setting for a richer experience.

Visually, Syberia – Remastered was a treat. Aside from a few visual flickers here and there, it looked stellar, with a charming and atmospheric world on offer. Even details like the menus felt well-crafted and in tune with the game’s overall vibe.

Something that did stand out to me as an issue was the use of text throughout the game. Firstly, some introductory cutscenes featured white text on light backgrounds without any dark keystrokes or shadows, making it somewhat tricky to read.

Secondly, the scrolling text in dialogue boxes could also be somewhat hard to parse at times. I went back and checked out gameplay from the original title for a visual contrast; I’m aware that this is a feature from the original, but I would’ve loved to see an option for larger text boxes and a lack of moving text.

Neither of these issues greatly affected my experience overall, but it would’ve been grand to see further options for text alteration and accessibility in the game’s menu.

Outside of this, I didn’t encounter any major issues with Syberia – Remastered. Movement felt fine, if ever-so-slightly clunky in a few places, and the UI was easy to navigate. The visuals were delightful and paired perfectly with the quality sound design, making for a rich and immersive experience overall.