Adventure Gamers - Forums

Today’s screenshot is from Syberia 2, which is also currently being played in the community playthrough.

Syberia 2 is better know for its story and the beautiful graphics, than it is for its puzzles, but there are also a couple of excellent puzzles (and a couple of not so excellent ones), and this one is my personal favourite from the game. One thing I like about the puzzle design in the game is that they are what I call subtle puzzles, and what I mean by that is that they are usually not hinted very heavily, which is probably a result of the fact that the game hasn’t got an outright look function.

In almost every other game, if you clicked on the above screenshot, the protagonist would say something like “There are the berries I’m looking for, but they are frozen in solid ice, how do I get them out?”, and if clicking on the lemming “Hey, perhaps this little guy can help me, if I ...”, but not in Syberia. All you get is the visual clues and you have to make the connections yourself, instead of getting verbal hints and confirmations that you are on the right or wrong track - and I quite like that.

The puzzle itself is also not quite as simple as it look. You have to force / encourage / help the lemming to crawl through the tunnels, but in order to do so you both have manipulate the environment close by this puzzle, and you have to find different inventory items and use them correctly. It is however also a puzzle that you can solve step by step, undoing and resetting individual steps that you might have gotten wrong, giving you plenty of opportunity to experiment, and see the result of different actions, instead of having to solve the whole thing in one go.

So even if it is perhaps not the most famous or the best puzzle in the history of adventure games, it is imo still a very well designed puzzle, that incorporates many different puzzle elements or types into one.

I loved this puzzle as well. Unless a puzzle in the final act tops this one, it’ll be my favourite puzzle out of both Syberia games.

It’s very well-designed and well-layered, and I fully endorse this AGSotD!