What games are you playing right now? Anything you'd recommend?

[SvennoJ]

I'm playing Syberia remastered atm, together with my wife. It's a game we played together back in 2002 just after we moved in together so it has that special nostalgia edge. And sadly, that's pretty all that is has going for it today.

First the one positive, the remastered visuals / environments are stunning.

Runs pretty decent as well (on Pro anyway)

The cut scenes however are not redone and look awful in comparison. I guess they tried to upscale them but they are full of color banding artifacts, ugly colors and all. I don't know why they couldn't fix the color issues at least, 256 color video in 2025...

Also the sound effects are pretty bad. The music quality is decent yet too overbearing (turn music volume down in the settings) however the sound effects are grating. Early on you activate the water wheel, drowning out everything while walking in the area, doesn't fade, just as loud next to it as 300 meters away. The station has a janitor whistling annoyingly, we turned the sound completely off every time we entered the station, too annoying.

Yet the worst of the worst are the controls, navigation and camera.

The camera seems to do its best to confuse you and hide stuff you are trying to find. You only have very limited control of the camera while it can move freely on its own, so you have to trick it into turning around to be able to see where you are going. Yet a lot of the time you end up with the camera filming you from the front while you walk/run in the opposite direction, kinda giving me motion sickness. Next to confusing you all the time after transitions, did I come from behind or in front, I need a map.

Controls are not updated for console, controlling a mouse pointer with analog stick sucks, especially since it doesn't use any dead zone and the slightest stick drift (which my controller has) makes the pointer (and her) occasionally move on its own. It's also very finicky in placement, both the cursor and when manoevering to an action point. It drove us nuts trying to cross the stairs at the station as you can't simply walk up, nope up and down manoever to the right spot where you can trigger goup, I mean 'go up' prompt. In the factory we could never access the blueprint for how to make the legs no matter how we manoevered Kate back and forth pirouetting in front of the dot. Had to look up online what to do...

Navigation is a pita compared to the original where you simply click where to go or double click to skip the walk. She refuses to walk in a straight line, gets hung up on lamp posts all the time, has to awkwardly turn around to do anything and still ends up facing the wrong way when talking to characters. Plus the camera keeps doing its thing throwing her off her path.

Sorry for the rant but how can it play so much worse than in 2002.

We made it to Barockstadt, chapter 2. We'll keep playing out of nostalgia, at least the voice acting was left intact. But I would not recommend this at all. Gameplay 1/10, how to ruin a great adventure game with the worst controls of 2025.