If you're a hardcore fan of the adventure game, Syberia is yet another which doesn't live quite up to the name. Of course, it does have puzzles, but these are fairly simple affairs, though still enough to baffle and delight the relative newcomer. It's much like The Longest Journey and Dreamfall in this respect.
There are other similarities too - Syberia has a female protagonist, in this case an American lawyer called Kate Walker, who is sent to tidy up the takeover of an automaton factory.
(The heart of Syberia's mystery: are all the mammoths gone?)
Female protagonists seem to be a feature of later adventure games - which perhaps has more to do with the genre's increased attention to story. After all, most male characters come into games fully formed as the eternal action man, a stereotype that was being particularly reinforced at the time of Syberia's production, when FPS and the burly metre-dicks hit their prime. That said, while Kate doesn't do weaponry, she's good at exploration, and, more than puzzles or anything else, that seems to be what Syberia does best.
It's not an open world - far from it. However, it is exquisitely imagined, from the charmingly creaky movements of the game's automatons to the beautiful backdrops of the places across Europe that Kate stops in on the way. It's practically a roadtrip movie, all in search of a man who went off looking for mammoths. Exploration is the main charm here, far beyond anything that the difficulty has to offer. The story's not bad too, there's even a small amount of mildly amusing dialogue.
(The automatons make Syberia what it is, but are sadly lacking in the sequel)
Syberia then is all right for a rainy day, a game that you can mince through in a few afternoons. It doesn't challenge, but some of the moments may inspire. You may wish to avoid the sequel however, until you're sure you like the first, as Syberia 2 is by necessity set in snowier climes. For that reason alone, exploration loses its fun a little - there's not half the colour as in the first game, especially during a horrendously frustrating (for all the wrong reasons) back in time sepia sequence. With the main charm lost, the only thing truly memorable about the sequel is the ending, though for those who've finished the first game, that alone may be enough.
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