Yeshu: That's the point of the game. It's like a cold winter dream. It's not about crazy, whimsical adventures ala Monkey Island. It's a journey of a person following his/hers dream no matter how ridiculous it might be. At times it's really surreal but still comprehensible.
If you can't slow down, you wont enjoy the game.
Also, i detect allot of negativity towards the female protagonist. Her being "cute" was never a selling point of the game.
Kamamura: I don't require my adventures to be whimsical and crazy. Blackwell is neither whimsical nor crazy, nor is Dreamweb and Gemini Rue.
However, I need the plot to be strong and interesting on its own, and in that regard, Syberia fails utterly. My suspicion is that the author, being some kind of painter, depended on visuals too much.
As to the protagonist, my negativity is not aimed against her (she is not a real person, after all), but at a clever and somewhat cynical tactics of the game designers who realized, after stunning success of Lara Croft, that a typical gamer of the time is a somewhat lonely geek, so offering him a sort of surrogate relation with the protagonist works very well (the player guides and cares for the protagonist, hence a sort of relationship develops). I don't care for that.
Blackwell series have female protagonists too, but do not depend on this cheap trick.
Female protagonists shouldn't need fan service elements to keep the player interested. It's laziness and more than a little bit of base-level "sex sells and serves as a form of lowest common denominator attention-grabbing to what we perceive as the core audience, guys who don't have much in the way of relationships with females" cynicism/contempt, like you mentioned.