Syberia Remastered review: new 3D visuals can't hide the aging Y2K design

When I first played Syberia back in 2002, it was hard not to be sucked into its richly detailed world, become obsessed with the inventive puzzles, and be captured by a story that blended steampunk oddities with melancholy adventure. Kate Walker’s journey to track down the last surviving mammoths captured my imagination, and the game has remained a beloved favourite for its hauntingly lonely landscapes and meticulously crafted environments.

Made in Unity, Syberia Remastered brings that world forward with care. Navigation is now smoother, with analogue sticks replacing the old mouse-driven pointer, giving exploration a more natural, immediate feel. Though, as I'll mention later, it remains stiff and a little clunky, as I remember for good and bad

The most striking change is the new 3D graphics. Environments are fully modelled, richly textured, and layered, evoking a painterly aesthetic reminiscent of the original but with a depth and solidity that wasn’t possible in 2002. Depth of field is used brilliantly to make each scene feel tangible: foreground objects, automata, and architecture have weight, while backgrounds blur gently to suggest distance, giving the player a genuine sense of inhabiting a physical space rather than moving through a static diorama.

Automata for the people

The steampunk world design is as charming as ever. Automata remain clunky, intricate, and iconic, and populate every location, from cluttered inventor workshops to snow-swept towns, alongside countless mechanical curiosities that reward careful observation.

This new detail can't prevent the game's world from feeling like a lonely place to explore. The sparsely populated towns, factories, and forests feel mechanically alive, though human interaction is rare, unless there's a puzzle to solve or a plot point to move along. However, the pervasive isolation reinforces the eerie, cold atmosphere. Occasionally, this illusion falters when cutting to older low-res FMV sequences, but the overall impact is to make the world feel inviting but uncomfortable.

Set across Eastern European towns and frozen landscapes, Syberia follows Kate Walker as she tracks the mysterious heir of a vast industrial empire, uncovering long-buried secrets, eccentric inventors, and elaborate automata along the way.

The puzzles remain classic point-and-click fare: item collection, logical problem-solving, and exploration-heavy sequences. Some puzzles have been simplified and some object designs streamlined, but the core challenge – deliberate, sometimes slow-paced, occasionally frustrating – remains intact.

Diaries, letters, and lectures reveal intricate character relationships, though some key questions remain elusive. Syberia can feel unbalanced and leave you asking more questions that have not been answered. Story and Adventure modes offer different levels of guidance, with Adventure mode recommended for long-time fans seeking the full, unassisted experience, while Story mode adds new ease-of-play features like quest objectives.

A puzzling remaster

Such new additions don't really go far enough. The UI remains scant, and along with some sluggish menu responses and controls that remain stiff and sluggish, there's no getting away from the fact that Syberia Remastered is a 20+ year old game in new clothes.

Syberia Remastered preserves everything that made the original special: its lonely, haunting world, inventive puzzles, whimsical steampunk charm, and now its 3D environments with a real sense of physicality. I just wish it didn't move at the pace of a 2002 point-and-click adventure.