I've only played Syberia 1.
If you like walking, walking up stairs, walking down stairs, walking some more, and walking around a lot, Syberia 1 is your cup of tea. The problem is you can't skip screens while walking/running around and whoever made that game was absurdly interested in padding the environment with screen after screen of useless scenery. If you ever forget something in an area, have fun crossing around 20-40 screens while backtracking. After I arrived in the second chapter, I was horribly fed up with having to traverse yet even more screens that could've easily been compressed into more compact gameplay. Staircases become the bane of your existence because they prolong the agony of travelling even further.
Perhaps the scenery was, once, considered of particularly good quality, but if that was the reason to make you suffer through it at a slow pace without the ability to skip, then the game hasn't aged very well at all in my opinion. The setting, however, is nice and interesting, but that's really all Syberia has going for it. Neither the story nor the characters were captivating enough for me to keep playing. The puzzles were decent.
Unless you posses the patience of a monk, I wouldn't recommend Syberia to anyone. The Longest Journey is, by far, a better game; one of the finest adventures I've every played in fact. I can't say anything of Syberia 2 because the first left a bad taste and I didn't want to take my chances with wasting time on the second. Perhaps I'll give it a shot one of these days.
