Siren: Blood Curse — Your Summer of Episodic Horror

Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: Out Now
Developer: SCE Japan Studio
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

By: Ryan A. Rubis

It begins…

August 2007. An American television crew arrives in Japan to investigate and document the legend of Hanuda, a “vanished village” where human sacrifices are said to have taken place some 30-odd years ago. If this sounds familiar—no, it wasn’t that kinky Japanese porn video you had on your hard drive a week ago—Siren: Blood Curse is actually a re-imagining of 2004’s Siren for the PlayStation 2, reworked and put up for download on the PlayStation Store.

Although I for one am particularly not a fan of microtransaction rape, Sony’s somewhat-unique distribution system for Siren: Blood Curse is what admittedly got me interested in the game. Although the game will also be released on Blu-Ray—in Japan, Singapore and Europe, at least—Sony is definitely pushing the envelope as far as the term “downloadable game” goes: Much like previous PlayStation Store entries Gran Turismo 5: Prologue and Warhawk, Siren: Blood Curse is a full, retail game crammed into one gargantuan download—the entire game takes a whopping 9.8GB off your PS3 hard drive; good luck downloading all of that with your puny broadband connection. Aside from being able to download the entire game in one transaction, Sony also offers a piecemeal solution for both the less fortunate of bandwidth, as well as gamers who prefer to take the experience one step at a time.

The game is divided into 12 episodes—one can elect to either grab all 12 episodes at once, as I’ve mentioned earlier, or download self-contained “chapters” (groups of four episodes), or just get one episode at a time. As silly as this all sounds, it honestly makes sense to just get one chapter or episode at a time if you’re one of those obsessive-compulsive people who have massive backlogs and just can’t bear to see a bunch of unfinished chapters just lying there on their hard drive. I’m one of those people, by the way.

And admittedly, the episodic nature of the game does lend itself well to the entire scope of things—each chapter is self-contained, the upside being there’s no need to fuss about what to carry over or do in the next chapter; you’re playing the game from six different perspectives throughout the game, so having ammo and stuff carry over to another character in another time period would be ridiculous. It’s kind of like watching an ongoing TV series—a lot of action and movement going on in each unique episode, but everything kind of ties together by the conclusion. One downside of the episodic format is that both the characters and plot aren’t really fleshed out during the entire game. But who cares about story, really—just plop me into some random creepy house inexplicably, and I’ll figure out the rest.

And without hyperbole, that’s actually how most of Siren works. Most of the game is about figuring out what works for each environment—if there’s a puzzle to be solved, zombies to be killed, or stealth sections to slink by—and just doing it. The game avoids being too ambiguous with its objectives and practically shrieks and directs the player on what to do, and if you failed, it isn’t because you suck at survival horror; it’s just that you were doing it wrong. Game didn’t give you a gun? Okay, turn off the flashlight; you’ll need to do some sneaking. Have at least a pistol? Whip it out and kill everything in sight. Can’t move forward? There’s a fetch quest or puzzle to do nearby, do it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but at least the game delivers without much filler—ideally, of course.

However, the game’s linearity does tend to catch up with itself sometimes. You’ll find yourself wandering aimlessly around the maps looking for stuff to do—until you open up your map and find everything clearly laid out for you. Great. The game’s ugly side rears its head whenever the game is unclear about whatever goals you’re supposed to do to progress towards, exposing the wonky level design and overall uninteresting environments while you’re itinerant. Because it’s so linear, there can be a ton of downtime once you get lost, and the initial spooks the game throws at you soon grow flaccid as frustration sets in.

But when it works, Siren is genuinely creepy. Relying on “whoa, what the hell was that?” moments to mystify the player, “oh God, it’s coming at me, help” scenarios whenever you think you’re done with a puzzle, and plain ol’ “zombies, zombies, I’m drowning in them” in between, as long as you’re going about your goals briskly, there’s no shortage of amazingly scary moments in the game. A unique “sight-jacking” system even furthers the game’s pace by splitting the screen and showing what’s happening to the other characters in medias res, or even providing some insights as to what the zombies were before they became worm-chow, adding to the tension of either solving a delicate puzzle, or blasting away hordes of the undead while you’re at it. At best, sight jacking helps you navigate and figure out what to do next, but at worst it’s a pain in the butt because it’s taking up half the screen.

As you would imagine, it was a pain to get Siren up and running (although background downloading was a nice addition, I wish that PSN downloads would just install themselves post-download), but luckily us Region 3 gamers can just grab the Asian version on Blu-Ray—a bit more expensive, but if you don’t really care for the episodic format and are on a scrawny 1Mbps connection, then that’s an option to consider. And if you were missing Kyoya and the gang from the first Siren, don’t worry—Siren: Blood Curse Americanizes everything much better than the slipshod Asian horror flick remakes we’ve seen lately. No Jessica Alba here, though—bummer, I know.