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Syberia ii wind train8/17/2023 ![]() Sinking Island makes this mostly subtext, as you get to see this incredible art deco hotel and watch as it slowly falls apart and sinks into the deep blue sea, and the women you meet are often just done with the toxic masculinity bullshit they regularly deal with. While I have yet to play Paradise, the setting and premise tells me those themes are loud and proud. I use “men” and not “humanity” because women are often victims or the first of the civilized world smart enough to break away from the way things are. ![]() Sokal’s game work is obsessed with the natural world and old world cultures, not to mention how men challenge those worlds with modernization and violence. While Paradise is probably the most famous of their titles, a story about a European woman in the middle of an African civil war, the one that stuck with me was Sinking Island, a murder mystery set on an island hotel sinking in an Earth shaking hurricane. He founded White Birds Productions to produce quality point and click games after Syberia 2, but a few projects bloated in development and the studio went under, though not before producing some notable work. He hasn’t directed as much as you’d expect, partly due to him going solo and failing at it. Syberia is simply unlike anything else in the gaming world, outside of Sokal’s own work. This was a major release in the time of Halo, people. Syberia is genuinely one of the most creative games ever made, and one of the most truly mature game series I’ve ever seen. It’s fitting that a game so focused on riding a train would go off the rails so hard. It became his most famous work and a major series among point and click die-hards. The end result was 1999’s Amerzone, and come 2002, Sokal topped that with one of the most memorable point and clicks ever made: Syberia. ![]() This invention inspired Sokal to try making games, and his ambition grew as he partnered with Microids, one of Europe’s most significant names in the point and click genre. He created a pretty wide variety of pulpy works, coloring them with a personal computer, and he probably would have remained a minor figure in the comics world if not for the spread of the CD-ROM. Born in Brussels, Belgium, Sokal was mostly known as a comic artist for most of his years, creating a series about a drunk, smoking detective duck called Inspector Canardo. There are few names in gaming that grab my interest as much as that one, which is strange, because it was only just last year that I found out that this man existed.
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