Syberia/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Innuendo:
    • In Aralbad there are two possibly naked chess-playing men in one of the pools, who constantly describe the game in sexual-sounding terms. Like "I'll thrust through with the queen" or "I'll squeeze the bishop. Everyone loves a good bishop-squeeze."
    • If the player talks to Oscar when he's standing outside in Aralbad and Kate accuses him of being absent minded, he will say he thinks of many things, but he "doesn't think of watersports". There are many random words the writers could have used but they went with that one?
  • Anvilicious: The first game's plot seems like an attack on American culture. Kate's boss and boyfriend are absolute Jerkass characters who could not care the slightest about the amazing wonders she finds or the fact she's only been gone a couple of days at most. Instead, Kate discovers amazing wonders and broadens her horizons while giving up her materialist ways. So, Tropes Are Not Bad.
  • Designated Villain: Kate's boss is consistently trying to talk her out of pursuing Hans Voralberg and in the second game's cutscenes he's always portrayed as a silhouette in the dark, stuck behind his mean bossy desk. And while he is supposed to be the representation of the consumerist culture Kate's trying to escape from, it's hard to blame him for trying to get her back to New York: not only is she the best lawyer he's got on his crew, but also her family is constantly pestering him about her whereabouts (also, while it's never explicitly mentioned, it's clear that should Kate be pronounced missing it's him who'd be held responsible) and the arguments he brings up when he talks to her on the phone (such as her leaving behind her life and friends) all seem pretty legit. For all we know, he might just be genuinely worried about her.
  • Jerk Ass Woobie: Serguei Borodine.
  • Porting Disaster:
    • The Nintendo DS version, which stripped out almost all the audio and turned the game into a particularly frustrating Pixel Hunt.
    • In the Xbox 360 version, where you control Kate manually, she gets caught on every single wall and object that you try to move her past. Compare this to Grim Fandango, which had special programming to keep the main character from getting stuck on scenery, 16 years prior.
    • On the other hand, the cell phone version won PC Gamer's "Oh my God it works" award.