Summary
- Syberia – Remastered launches November 6 on Xbox Series X|S.
- Aurélien Lévêque, Game Director at Virtuallyz, discusses the challenges of remastering such an iconic adventure game.
- Find out how the studio strived to find a balance between improving upon Benoît Sokal’s vision and staying true to the original.
Released in 2002, the first Syberia left an impact on the adventure genre. Three sequels followed, and enriched the universe created by the author Benoît Sokal. Now, 2025 sees the arrival of a remaster of the first episode, which takes what made the success of the original, all while adding elements to bring it up to modern standards.
Between Remake and Remaster
Even though Syberia – Remastered logically presents itself as a remaster, the teams at Virtuallyz and Microids Studio Paris decided to modernize the game to speak to a broader audience. They immersed themselves into what had been done for Syberia – The World Before released in 2022, as Aurélien Lévêque, Game Director at Virtuallyz, explains: “The backgrounds have been entirely modeled after the original 2D plans, so we had to imagine some missing viewpoints. Even the characters have been entirely modeled and animated in 3D.”
“Fun fact: at the start of the project, we didn’t have enough 3D models for all the characters, so we used Felix Smetana, the receptionist at the Kronsky Hotel, everywhere when working on the cutscenes. After seeing him so many times, he ended up becoming the team’s mascot. Thankfully, we got the opportunity to work with the team at Microids Studio Paris, which developed Syberia – The World Before and Amerzone – The Explorer’s Legacy, to help us achieve the level of quality we aimed for.”
Taking advantage of this 3D modeling, the development team were able to completely revamp the camera to make the game more enjoyable and readable, all the while allowing players to better locate themselves in the environment. Moving protagonist Kate around has also been greatly improved, as Aurélien goes into details on the matter: “We took inspiration from many elements in The World Before, starting with the character controller, meaning the way Kate moves around using a controller or computer mouse. Microids Studio Paris also helped us with putting the camera in place.”
Always with modernization in mind, the team tried to make choices that would satisfy both old fans and new players who want to discover the series. As such, they decided to implement a quest journal in the vein of what was present in The World Before, and to offer two different game modes: Story Mode, which gives hints so that players won’t stay stuck too long, and Adventure Mode, in which no help is provided and is thus way closer to the original experience.
Preserving Benoît Sokal’s legacy
The team did everything to find the right balance between the wish to improve the author’s vision and staying true as possible to the DNA of the original. Thus, if the original cutscenes have simply been upscaled, the backgrounds have benefited from a complete overhaul. Used to the Unity engine, Virtuallyz and Microids Studio Paris were able to greatly improve the visuals to enhance Benoît Sokal’s vision without altering the geography of the locations. In addition, by using the HDRP (Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline), Virtuallyz was able to make the whole experience more immersive than ever, as Aurélien points out: “The HDRP is a rendering pipeline made for next-gen or current-gen consoles. It enables more realistic lighting, but also more control on ‘material PBR’ (Physically Based Rendering), generally used to add a sense of realism and texture to objects. All those factors allowed for an improvement of the scenery, as well as for the characters.”
The sound design was also reworked. Given that the original plot hasn’t been modified, the decision to keep the original dubbing and music was made quite early into the project. However, the devs have improved some old sounds that didn’t age well, and created new ones (such as the crackling of the chimney fire) to emphasize the immersion. Aurélien adds: “We worked on FMOD so that the voices and sounds would take into account the acoustics of the rooms or of the exterior.”
The studio faced some challenges with the cutscenes, especially as they were trying make the direction smoother while also making sure that everything would be consistent, no matter the language.
“As each language uses a different duration, we had to design an ingenious system so that the cutscenes would adapt to the duration of each sound,” Aurélien explains. “A lot of work was done to make sure that everything would interlink perfectly, and we even added new animations with travelling effects to make the whole thing more dynamic and harmonious.”
The team made all those improvements to improve Benoît Sokal’s original vision and give Syberia a new lease of life. Get ready for a one-of-a-kind journey across Europe in Syberia – Remastered, releasing on November 6 on Xbox Series X|S.
Syberia – Remastered
Microids