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Syberia Spoilers

Welcome to the new Computer Game Spoilers section of my gaming website. I added this section because I recently received questions about the plots of two different games which, to my surprise and embarrassment, I had totally forgotten the answers to. Then, to my further surprise, I was unable to find any existing website that would refresh my memory about the plots of computer games... lots of puzzle solutions, but no basic plot summaries.

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So I figured I'd better write some of them down while they're still fresh in my mind, just in case I or anybody else wants to refer to them at some point in the future (or in case anybody suffers a major game glitch and just wants to know what was supposed to happen in the end-- I get letters like this from time to time.) If you haven't finished Syberia yet and you don't want the plot of this game to be revealed to you, then you don't want to read this page. Please go back to my main Syberia page, where I give tips and reviews without giving away any of its plot.

But if you are looking for plot spoilers, just scroll further down the page to find them!

Plot Summary

Kate Walker is an American lawyer sent overseas to ink a corporate takeover of a toy company. Unfortunately, the owner dies just before Kate arrives, so she must travel across Europe trying to track down the dead woman's brother Hans, a reclusive inventor, to get him to sign in her stead. This may not sound like much of a plot, but the twist is that the Syberia games are set in an unusual, slightly-different-from-what-you're-expecting alternate-universe version of the Earth we live in, which is why some of the strange and mystical things the protagonist encounters along the way barely get a shrug out of her and others have her gasping in shock. By the time she finally finds Hans--having solved many puzzles, become caught up in the spirit of adventure, and finally gotten her annoying boyfriend to stop calling her on the cellphone every 15 minutes--Kate has lost her interest in corporate law, and leaves her old life behind to go off in search of mammoths with her quirky new friends.

Character Subplots and Secrets

Dan: Kate's annoying needy boyfriend who spends most of the game re-dialing her number and whining at her about how she could possibly leave him alone for five whole days and how could a business trip be more important to her than his feeeeeeeeeelings. He's mostly just a useless irritant (he always seems to manage to call right when something exciting is happening that you don't want to be interrupted from by Dan's issues, too), but he does have a plot resolution near the end: unable to cope with being left to his own devices any longer, Dan sleeps with Kate's friend Olivia, thus finally giving Kate a good reason to dump him and block his cellphone number.

Serguei Borodine: This devoted fan of retired opera singer Helena Romanski is overjoyed when Kate succeeds at bringing her to Komkolzgrad for one last concert. But while she's singing, he shows his true obsessive-stalker colors by springing a trap on her and imprisoning her in an ironwork cage. Then he tries to blow Kate to smithereens for rescuing her. For someone who seemed like such a hopeless dork, this guy turned out to be really bad news. In the end the two women escape together on the train, leaving Serguei to his frustrated fantasies.

Boris: He is a poignant figure, a Russian test pilot who came within days of achieving his life's dream, a mission into space. Tragically for him, the mission was canceled, the space program fell into obscurity, and Boris was left to guard the deserted space center and drink vodka for the rest of his life. He agrees to give Kate the Russian airship that will bring her to Aralbad if she will man the controls to launch him into space. There is no discussion of how he will get back; it was pretty clear to me that he's not, but that he wanted to achieve his dream and see the stars before he dies.

Anna and Hans: This is also a tragic story. Hans and his sister Anna were extremely close, but after a childhood fall while exploring a cave, Hans apparently took some brain damage and was never the same again. He became a mechanical genius but had trouble communicating and, apparently, emoting-- despite his sister's yearning letters to him he never returned to Valadilene after leaving to pursue his dream of finding mammoths, and she died without ever seeing him again. Most disturbingly, he had no emotional reaction at all when Anna told him about his sister's death, seemingly unable to care about anything other than his ongoing mammoth adventure (which was what was on his mind at the time of his head trauma.) I found this part very depressing, personally.