Locked Door Puzzle

If you’re a fan of survival horror like me then hopefully you’ll have come across Siren at some point in your gaming travels. Created by Keiichiro Toyama who was also responsible for the first Silent Hill game. As you might have already guessed he’s carried over his love of creepy air raid sirens. Thankfully though the Silent Hill connection stops there, rather than being a mere Hill clone, Siren is very much its own game packed full of ideas.

While I know many people who played the first Siren game, not very many of them finished it, myself included. The game was cripplingly difficult to play, with even the slightest mistake punished by instant death. It also didn’t help that the overly British dub jarred strongly with the Japanese settings and characters. Siren: Blood Curse is a PS3 reimagining of the original PS2 game with two key differences, firstly it’s now got a bunch of American characters in there but more importantly it’s now actually fun to play. This is essentially the game I wanted to play the first time around.

An American Zombie in Japan

Settings wise Siren finds its own niche, Resident Evil has it’s b-movie zombies, Project Zero has traditional Japanese ghosts and spirit photography, Silent Hill brings up twisted monsters from the psyche, but Siren focuses on a very japanese take on zombies and demons.

In Blood Curse an American film crew goes to investigate the site where a remote mountain town disappeared 30 years earlier. However they arrive to find the town not only still there but in the middle of enacting a strange ritual sacrifice, that is rudely interrupted by another young American running away with their sacrifice to be. From there things get really strange, it seems most of the town population has been turned into strange “shibito” zombies all to eager to hunt down and kill any living survivors, all while a blood red rain falls from the sky. From there the mystery begins, why did the town disappear 30 years ago and what has happened to the people living there?

Box of Delights

I said earlier the game was full of ideas so let’s talk about some of them:

Multiple Protagonists - The game has no single hero, instead you take control of a variety of characters over the same period of time, following their intertwining paths over the course of the game. A nice trick that is a basic ingredient in other mediums but largely avoided in games, I suspect largely due to concerns about immersion and player progression.

Non-Linear Storytelling - In the original version of Siren the gameplay was entirely non-linear. You had a grid showing characters on one axis and time on the other and could play out squares in that grid as the game unlocked them for you. Meaning you jumped back and forth through the story, trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to the town. Sadly this was lost in the remake and replaced with a more linear structure but with a big time loop in the middle to add some variety.

Stealth - Siren is also one of the only stealth horror games, instead of launching at monsters with a lead pipe screaming “have at ya” the game makes weaponry and ammunition so scarce that most of the game relies on you making it to your goal without your enemies ever spotting your presence. This is made possible through the bizarre “sight jacking” power that allows you to see what nearby monsters can see. Leading to lots of tense sequences where you hide in a cupboard and learn their movement patterns.

Episodic Content - Siren: Blood Curse also seems to have been a failed experiment in episodic gaming. The game is split up into 12 chapters, each ending on an appropriate cliff hanger, and each including the obligatory previously on Siren and next episode previews. The developers of the game seem to have done a good job splitting the game up into installments that could have been released weekly at a low price. However the whole thing was rendered rather pointless when the game was released with all episodes being available for download on the same day. Meaning you just end up downloading the whole lot and playing it like any other game. I strongly suspect a difference of opinion between the developer and the publisher led to this.

External Exposition - One element of the storytelling I wasn’t so keen on was the reliance on the built in archive. Completing missions, finding hidden items or performing optional side tasks unlocks content in your archive. Here you find snippets of information relating to the game’s story including diaries, notes, character ID badges, tape and video recordings, etc… A great way to expand the story of the game, however in reality the game featured too little exposition within its cutscenes (a rarity I’m sure you’ll agree) and explains much of the story through the archive. The upshot of this is if you play the game end to end you’ll be very confused as to what just happened and only when you sit outside of the game world in the archive can you fathom what really happened. A disconnect that didn’t sit too well with me.

Scarier than Driv3r

Siren: Blood Curse is a great game, a simplified but much more fun version of the flawed masterpiece that was the original Siren. Like all of the Siren games it’s filled with inventive ideas and different approaches to horror storytelling than you’ll see in other survival horror games. It has some flaws such as the lack of exposition I already mentioned, and the later sections not only get harder but a bit more obtuse in working our your current objective. However minor quibbles asides Siren is a horror game and the most important thing is even a seasoned horror viewer such as myself found is genuinely creepy, scary and shocking in all the right places.