Aside from a troubled start, Syberia: The World Before's protagonist Kate gets the introspective story she deserves.
There are too few characters like Kate Walker in video gaming: a venerable female protagonist who held up a storied franchise while also having depth of character. Samus is cool, but she’s a cipher. Lara Croft had no inner life until Rhianna Pratchett blessed her with one in recent years. But Kate has held up her franchise’s sky since 2002, and she’s done so with compelling characterization from the jump.
Fittingly, Syberia: The World Before, the fourth and most recent entry in the franchise—and the last to be helmed by Belgian cartoonist Benôit Sokal, who tragically passed away last year—is Kate’s story, through-and-through. A psychodramatic tale of legacy, consequences, and being true to oneself.
It gets off to a rocky start with writing and voice acting that feel especially forced, and with Kate Walker getting a girlfriend only for her to be unceremoniously killed off in the prologue. Yet, from such inauspicious beginnings the game soars with all the grace of a symphony. For those who have been fans of this two-decade-old franchise, Kate Walker has always been a huge part of the reason they fell in love, and that faith is rewarded in a story that centers on her dealing with the consequences of her adventuresome life, a journey we’ve been on with her since 2002.
That first game saw Kate arrive in the fictional French town of Valadilene as a polished New York lawyer who was there to close a deal to gobble up an automaton factory, only to leap on a train to the East in pursuit of a mechanical mystery—and away from her old life. Kate Walker abandoned a failing marriage, false friendships, and a soul-destroying job for a life of puzzle-solving adventure at the ends of the Earth with her stalwart automaton companion, Oscar. Over the course of two more games, we would guide her on one quest after another, always one more train to catch, one more castle in the air to find. Now, however, it all finally catches up to her.
What follows is a remarkably sensitive, beautiful exploration of a character who’s meant the world to me for over half of my life.
Equally striking about this worthiest of sequels is its double-helix narrative, transposing us between Kate Walker in the “present” of 2005, and the 1930s-40s of the game’s other protagonist, the young pianist Dana Roze, who bears a mysterious resemblance to Kate—a fact that Kate discovered in an old painting she recovered from a derelict Nazi train as she was fleeing from a labor camp run by contemporary fascists. The discovery drives our erstwhile lawyer on one more mad quest. Just one more castle in the air to find. One last time.
Who is the girl in the painting?
This is a game with a more restrained and realistic narrative than its predecessors, which frequently indulged in outright magical realism and speculative fiction in its secondary world—an Earth just to the side of our own, with different names for familiar places, and an ascendancy of clockwork machinery that subtly altered the course of history. Those machines, the famous Voralberg automatons that have fascinated Kate since the first act of the first game, play a key role in this story too. But the heart of the narrative lies in Kate unravelling a mystery that could just as easily have taken place in our own world: a story of family, love, loss, and betrayal.
Dana Roze is a young Jewish girl and prodigal pianist in the musical city of Vaghen, whose hopes run up against the depredations of the “Brown Shadow,” the nickname the people in this world gave to the Nazis. It is ultimately her story that supplies the narrative with its key twists and mysteries, revealing a life that is at once tragic and triumphant. She becomes a fixation for Kate as she tries to keep running from her own past, not quite realizing that Dana is leading her to an unavoidable confrontation with it. It’s a beautifully told story that is fundamentally sympathetic to Kate’s wanderlust while not fully letting her off the hook for abandoning so many along the way.
It’s a credit to Syberia: The World Before that this story still feels so ethereal and magical despite being grounded in so painfully real a story. Amidst its archipelago of allegories is, after all, an emotional core that anyone who has encountered fascism—past or present—can relate to. The hypodermic needle of the game’s little tragedies will elicit tears from you when you least expect it. There’s far less magic, and the fate of the world, or of a whole people—like the Youkol from Syberia 3—is no longer at stake. But this deeply personal story, with an intimacy that explores and links two women across time, is magical in its own way.
That magic comes, in part, from the setting. It is one final, achingly beautiful Sokal tableau. Syberia has always been about Sokal’s desire to reclaim Central and Eastern Europe—the home of his Jewish ancestors who were forced to flee by the Nazis—from the terrible ideologies that gripped them and made refugees or corpses of so many innocents. That theme was oblique in the first three games: this one stares Nazism in the face. The game’s narrative emphasizes the Brown Shadow’s despoiling of beauty—the beauty of Dana Roze’s life and music, and the beauty of Vaghen itself, a majestic city of Art Nouveau whose very architecture is a character in its own right.
Sokal was nothing if not a profoundly nostalgic man. Syberia was always a point-and-click adventure through the mists of a never-happened fantasy, with Kate wending her way through decaying monuments to architectural movements long gone, in the faded glory of galleries and dead cities. Vaghen is, by contrast, alive and rich with life, making it less lonely than some of the settings in previous games.
I like to think that Sokal, who reportedly was very resistant to making even contemporary Vaghen look contemporary, would nevertheless have been pleased that the game’s “present day” has become a nostalgia piece. The series has proceeded in real time since 2002, so the fourth installment takes place in 2005; Kate’s use of a basic desktop computer at her inn, or the game’s payphones, give one the feel of an accidental period piece. In that way, the game’s theme of longing achieves perfect consistency.
The very nature of point-and-click adventure feels a little nostalgic too, these days, even if it’s experiencing something of a (long overdue, richly deserved) comeback. But in that sense, nothing about Syberia 4’s innovative puzzles feels dated. The game is at its strongest when it shifts effortlessly between Dana and Kate’s respective stories. The absolute best bits are a sort of adventure game puzzle pas de deux where you can switch between the two women at will, doing things in the past with Dana that will help Kate solve puzzles in the present. And the game’s “final boss” puzzle is a clockwork masterpiece that felt so very good to solve; with rare exception, none of these game’s puzzles feel especially obtuse. They're intuitive and reward the kind of tactile experimentation that would result from playing with a Voralberg clockwork in real life.
But Kate is the thing. And what I needed most from this game was to do her justice; I’m so gratified that it did. For how disappointing would it have been, in a year where our very own Brown Shadow menaces us from the horizon, for Kate Walker to have been lost to a muddle of clichés, bad writing, and sexist tropes? Aside from the game’s troubled start, Kate gets the introspective story she deserves. She doesn’t apologize for who she is, but she confronts the hurt she’s caused at last. She bears the weight of her obsessions with some torment, yes, but also the kind of limber grace we’ve come to expect of her.
For many women gamers of a certain age, Kate Walker was that rarest of things: an aspirational fantasy of a protagonist. But of course, you can’t just drop everything and run away on a globe-spanning adventure. The trick Syberia: The World Before pulls off is that it deals with that reality while still providing a truly escapist, heroic adventure, starring a woman who faces her demons without becoming trapped by them.
Like Kate Walker, I don’t know who I’d be without another train to catch—and thankfully, the game is ultimately very understanding of people like us. I didn’t want the adventure to end, after all. With any luck (i.e. the production of Syberia 5), it won’t have to.
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