Syberia: The World Before is a point & click adventure game designed by the Belgian comic artist Benoît Sokal, developed and published by Microids. It is the fourth instalement in the Syberia series.
Plot[]
In Syberia: The World Before players take on the roles of Dana Roze and Kate Walker, the heroine of the previous Syberia games. This time, the game plays in different times and locations - mostly Vaghen and its surroundings in both 1937 and later years as well as in 2005, while Kate's initial starting point is at Iron Taiga, in 2004.
The story starts in Vaghen, Ostherthal's capital, in spring 1937, and introduces Dana Roze - an aspiring pianist, planning to go on to Paris Conservatory, who is to perform at the town's remarkable musical square their annual tune. The subplots make it clear also that Europe is at the brink of war, with a fascist faction "Brown Shadow" wanting to take over control.
As Dana makes her performance, story switches Kate Walker in winter 2004. After the events of the previous title, she has been imprisoned as a slave laborer in a salt mine in "Iron Taiga" area alongside a young Russian woman called Katyusha Spiridonova. Before the day's work, Kate is informed via letter that her mother, Sarah Walker, had passed away. The letter is from her former friend Olivia, who wrote it back in summer 2003, urging Kate During to come back home for her mother's funeral. Kate is devastated, and Katyusha tries to console her. Later on, during their digging, a distraught Kate causes a minor collapse in the mine shaft, revealing a parallel cave, containing a train belonging to a Brown Shadow task force. The pair discovers that the train contains vast amounts of stolen art and antiques, amongst which there is a painting of a young woman almost identical to Kate. Before they could escape with the nearby motorbike, they're confronted by their prison guard, who shoots Katyusha dead and is incapacitated by Kate. With her dying breath, Katyusha asks Kate to track down the girl in the painting.
The story also covers Dana's life, where she still lives happily with her family, but incidents upset their daily life - such as someone throwing a rock through their business' glass window, a sign of hatred towards Vagerans.
Kate travels across Europe, and about a year after her escape from the mine she reaches Vaghen. Once there, she tracks down the antique shop that sold the music case that housed the painting. While there she also installs the heart of Oscar, Hans Voralberg's automaton engineer, into a Voralberg-designed mechanical armadillo and revives her companion. The trail leads Kate to a remote mountain refuge on the outskirts of Vaghen, occupied by an elderly wheel-chair bound lady - Leni Renner. Renner recounts her past with Dana, who had come to the refuge in the summer of 1937 to work as a waitress. The refuge at the time was hosting an expedition in pursuit of a proto-human specimen called the Gorun. The group is guided by a young alpinist named Leon Kovatsin, with whom Leni is deeply smitten. After an altercation with, Herr Hoss, the Brown Shadow officer supervising the expedition, Dana and Leon strike up a romance.
Through her exploration and conversations, Kate manages to piece together the story of what happened with Dana, Leon and the others.
The expedition eventually departs for Baltayar, where the Gorun is theorised to live. As the winter sets in, tensions in the expedition rise due to the lack of success and Leon finds out that some of the members of the group plan on making him the scapegoat for their failure. However, one member of the group, Sauer, finally finds the Gorun. As he runs off to fetch the rest of the group, Leon approaches the creature and strikes up an amicable relationship by tending to his wounds and feeding him his ration of hardtack biscuits. On the other hand, the expedition is far harsher than Leon in their treatment. The creature's wails attract his mother's attention and the group's leader tries to shoot her dead, Leon tackles and accidentally kills him. With the Goruns gone and their leader dead, the group ties up Leon for trial. However, Sauer confides to Leon that he doesn't agree with his colleagues and sets him free and agrees to send his last letter to Dana.
Dana collapses at the news of Leon. It is revealed that she's pregnant with his child. Her parents, fearing public embarrassment, allow her to be taken to a remote sanatorium by their friends, the Zimmer family. Soon after her departure, the Roze household, as well as the rest of their district, is marauded by the Brown Shadow led by Hoss and Dana's parents are murdered in the pogrom. Following this discovery, Kate who had been tracking Dana's whereabouts is encountered by her hitherto elusive neighbour, "Colonel Blake" who turns out to be Frau Junta, a friend of Dana and a British-Austrian double agent who spied on the Brown Shadow on behalf of the British Secret Service during the war. She reveals that Dana's daughter Anna was stillborn and was buried in Baden Island in western Vaghen. Following the loss of her child, Junta takes Dana to Britain, where she becomes an operative of the SOE. An assignment reveals that Leon was in fact alive and is operating a resistance network in Vaghen. Dana agrees to be air-dropped into Vaghen and coordinate a dangerous mission.
Kate confronts Leni Renner after three bodies, lost since the war, are retrieved by forensic pathologists. It is revealed that Leon survived the harsh Baltayar winter thanks to the Gorun tribe who took him in. As the war began, Leon returned to Vaghen to fight, and was accompanied by "Ludwig Hardtack", the young Gorun whom he helped before the war. Joined by Leni Renner, they operated out of the winter refuge against the Brown Shadow. Leni had been biding her time for Leon to forget about Dana, whom he believes to have been murdered in the Vaghen pogrom, but Dana turning up alive and rekindling her romance with Leon enrages her. She rats out the network to her father Gustav, a collaborator. The refuge comes under attack and Leon sets out to exfiltrate the civilians as Leni, Dana and Ludwig make a stand to cover them. Leni gets critically injured and as their numbers dwindle, Ludwig goes berserk to slaughter the rest of the attackers. However, the prolonged fighting (including Ludwig's use of a grenade) trigger an avalanche, burying Leon and his charge, the Exners.
Following the war, Dana emigrates to the United States and becomes a renowned pianist and marries, but is unable to have more children. She regularly wrote to Leni and in her last letter in the 1980s, she revealed that she was shocked by the confession of a nun from her time at the sanatorium that the Zimmers, to whom she was entrusted during her labour and later coma, took her baby as their own and lied to her about the stillbirth. She tracks down her now-adult daughter, who is revealed to be Sarah Walker, Kate's mother. Deciding against revealing herself, and feeling little connection to the daughter who has never met he, Dana decides to leave. Before she can do so she briefly encounters a young Kate and accompanies her as they play the Hymn of Vaghen on her piano. Dana notes that, while she had a god life, there was also "a world before" - a world in which there was Leon and where they had plans together. She left the US afterwards "for the only destination that had any meaning to me...".
Kate recalls the lady with which she shared that piano song, notes she came to the end of this adventure, found freedom fulfilled promise she gave to Katyusha and discovered a part of her mother's past. But she realises it makes no difference to the guilt and emptiness she feels over her mother's passing. She wonders if it would be different if she met Dana in person, but doubts she could find her - if she was even alive.
She uses the payphone at the train station to call her former best friend Olivia (now married to Kate's ex-fiancé Dan). She tells her she found her grandmother, which is a long story, and tells her that she is coming back. The conversation is much friendlier than the earlier one in the game when they mainly argued, and Kate apologises for things that happened since she left New York, acknowledges that she knows she has hurt people while going through her journey, but also admits that she has no regrets about being her true self over these years.
She sits on a train prepared to make her trip back to New York. However, before she can leave on it, she sees another train through the window - bound for Baltayar. This triggers an epiphany that Dana may have gone there live amongst the Gorun as she had planned to do with Leon. Running after the outbound train, she's helped aboard by Ludwig, who is also going home after Leni's passing. Kate acknowledges that she is "going back home too... In a way...".
Achievements and Trophies[]
Languages[]
Syberia: The World Before supports 13 languages:
- English
- German
- French
- Italian
- Dutch
- Spanish
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Simplified Chinese
- Traditional Chinese
- Japanese
- Korean
Official sites[]
- Microids - Syberia
- Microids on Discord
- Syberia: The World Before on Epic Games
- Syberia: The World Before on Steam
- Syberia: The World Before on GOG
Syberia: TWD Covers[]
