Well I bought this at the reduced price. I had been so looking forward to it as I loved the first. Soooo disappointing. Puzzles were worse than I would expect from a casual game but without the ability to skip. I would not have got through most of them without a WT. Why do the devs mix 2 genres like this? It's neither one thing nor the other!!! It appeals to neither adventure fans nor action fans.
I suppose they are trying to appeal to fans of Telltale's recent QTE games, like Tales from the Borderlands, Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us, and The Walking Dead. Telltale started out by creating revivals of adventure game series like Tales of Monkey Island and Sam & Max, and making adventure games based on popular non-game IP's like Back to the Future, Wallace and Gromit, and Bone. Then they switched over to making exclusively QTE games
(***Quick Time Event games***) based on popular IP's because they found them more profitable -- quicker and easier to make a QTE game that follows a story without having to worry about designing and integrating puzzles. Not that their QTE games are bad if you like that sort of thing -- they take care to do a good job with the story, character design, voice, etc. But if you don't enjoy QTE, those games are not for you. Unfortunately QTE games are being categorized under the adventure game unbrella, even though the gameplay is more action/timed than puzzle-oriented.
For me this was doubly disappointing as there are so few good adventure games around at the moment (BoUT 2 was the last....and that WAS worth waiting for!). What has happened to development of this genre? Not everyone wants maniacal pressing of buttons. Some of us like to think our way through. I only hope the devs of games such as Syberia 3 and Silence (Whispered World 2) don't fall into this trap.
I have more hope for Whispered World 2, since Book of Unwritten Tales 2 was a real adventure game and Daedalic has developed/published several other adventure games since Whispered World (Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, Dark Eye: Memoria, the three Deponia games, etc.). We have proof that Daedalic is capable of making a real adventure game.
Syberia 3 is being developed by the "new" Microids/Anuman (not the Microids that developed the original games). Microids/Anuman developed games like Dracula 4 and 5, which many adventure gamers thought were "too casual" and didn't even allow manual saves (used a single autosave, like a casual game). I don't mind playing a casual once in a while, but not all the time, and we are already inundated with new casual games from Big Fish. We know next to nothing about the actual gameplay that is being planning for Syberia 3. What we know is that Benoit Sokal insisted on it being made with a 3D game engine (similar to Assassin's Creed) and for console, which means it will probably play best with a game controller and there will most likely be no option for point-and-click at all. We've been shown a handful of pretty screenshots and a trailer (which showed cut scenes and panned around screenshots and concept art and didn't show any actual gameplay at all). We have next to no information about gameplay, which IMO is the most important feature of any game. If all I cared about were pretty pictures and story, I'd be watching movies.