Siren for the PS2
My introduction to the survival horror genre was the PS1 classic, Silent Hill. And boy, did it mess me up. At the time, I happened to live in a distant Texas suburb — normally a far cry from Lovecraft country, as my grandfather called it, but you’d be surprised to see the similarities between the eponymous town and my little piece of southern-fried suburbia in the dead of winter. It rained and snowed frequently, and tended to go dark at 4 p.m. every day. To add insult to injury, my family happened to live literally right down the road from a towering tornado siren, which was tested like clockwork the first Wednesday of every month around noon.
I first played Silent Hill when I was home sick from school one cold November morning, a morning which happened to fall on the first Wednesday of the month. Not long after entering the abandoned elementary school, the tornado siren down the street went off. Pardon the cliche, but the next few minutes felt like hours. It was fairly dark outside, and I was home alone with nothing but the wails of a siren and the monstrosities lurking inside the school to keep me company. I had nightmares that night, but I kept playing. I jumped at every shadow and sound around the house, but I just couldn’t stop myself. That day, I discovered my love for survival horror.
I seeked out others in the genre. A dash of Resident Evil here, a taste of Fatal Frame there, some Echo Night or Enemy Zero for a little extra spice. Nothing could scare me like Silent Hill had all those years ago, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless. Then came Siren, a PS2 exclusive with a development team largely comprised of Team Silent members, including Keiichiro Toyama, best known as the mad genius responsible for the original Silent Hill.
Siren takes place in a remote Japanese mountain hamlet known as Hanuda, where a cult is attempting to resurrect an ancient god. Of course, everything goes horribly wrong. The skies go dark, the lakes and rivers fill with a strange red liquid, and a wartime siren wails across the devastated village as everything goes to hell for its inhabitants. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But take my word for it — that’s where the similarities to Silent Hill end.
Set in the modern day, Siren hops between the stories of over a dozen characters unlucky enough to be in the village when everything goes south. Each person has their own equipment, strengths, and weaknesses, and many of them cross paths throughout their journey. Some have flashlights, some must navigate in the dark, and some don’t even have weapons to fight off the abominations lurking in the town. One particularly unfortunate girl has to navigate through the chaos while hindered by her longtime blindness. Every single character also happens to be slowly transforming into a zombie. With the mysterious siren came the shibito (literally “dead person” in Japanese), a unique type of undead who are strangely fascinated with the siren’s call.
The shibito aren’t like your average Resident Evil zombie, however. They are intelligent. They can speak. They can effectively wield firearms. They often carry memories from the life they had before they were transformed, and, most importantly, they cannot be killed. Sure, you can knock them out for a minute or two, but they will always, always get back up. And, in a few deeply disturbing cases, you’ll find yourself fighting off zombified versions of the people you were previously controlling. This slow transformation has its advantages, however. Totally unique to the genre is the ability to “sightjack”, or look through the eyes of surrounding shibito and your fellow infectees. Sightjacking is vital for survival, as you will need to see through your enemy’s eyes in order to plan out a path through each level.
Every stage is one long puzzle, and it is up to you to decide what the safest path will be. Siren also has no recovery items or health bars, but your infected character can automatically heal by standing still for a few seconds at a time. This is a very good thing, because Siren is a hard game. You will die, and you will suck at combat. Though Siren places heavy emphasis on sneaking and moving undetected, there are a few moments where combat in necessary, and it will take a few tries to get the timing down. Make no mistake — Siren is often frustrating in its difficulty, but it never fails to be absolutely terrifying. The shibito aren’t the only things you have to be frightened of. Because combat is so limited, the tension is through the roof for every second of the game.
The sound design is phenomenal, although the voice acting is somewhat lacking, and the soundtrack’s effective use of dark ambience contributes greatly to the game’s bleak atmosphere. That’s not to say it’s without its faults. I already said Siren is frustrating, but much of it actually works in the game’s favor. It is a horror game, and you have to feel like you’re in danger for a horror game to work. But there are a few mechanics that feel more like honest missteps, rather than deliberate tweaks done by a group of sadistic developers. If you want 100 percent completion and a look at the secret ending, you better have a guide handy.
Almost every level has at least one item that needs to be found, and many of them either blend into the background or are placed in obtuse locations. That bus stop graffiti in the second level? Go examine it. That dropped police badge in the first level placed far behind its owner, a zombified and trigger-happy cop? Hope you’re good at dodging bullets in the dark!
Another major source of frustration is the map, which has no location marker and automatically adjusts itself depending on the direction your character is facing, making navigation rather disorienting. Siren also does a poor job of explaining the mechanics to the player early on, leading to a lot of trial and error. Here’s a helpful hint for prospective players: those polygonal bushes scattered across many of the levels, the same sort of bushes you would expect to be nothing more than leafy decorations in any other game? You can hide behind them. Really, just about anything in a level can be turned into a hiding spot once you figure out how to crouch. Finally, while figuring out how to use your weapons effectively is unforgivingly hard, the mechanic at least serves its purpose — to scare the ever-loving daylights out of you.
The same cannot be said for the sniper rifle, wielded primarily by an elderly hunter named Akira. Each time you pull up the rifle to glance through the scope, it automatically begins zooming in, making aiming very difficult, particularly when you are trying to fight off a shibito who is standing directly in front of you. I initially thought this to be a problem with my controller, but according to the game’s manual, it’s actually intentional. I cannot think of a single reason why the developers decided to do this, other than to piss off the player. It definitely made me dread going into Akira’s levels, regardless of how unrelentingly badass the old codger is. But I digress.
If you can’t already tell, I love Siren. I love every agonizingly difficult second of it. For every moment where I wanted to throw my controller in frustration, there were three moments where I found myself delightfully spooked. I can say without any exaggeration that it is by far the scariest game I have ever played. If you’re a survival horror fan longing for a good scare, you have no excuse not to give it a try. Physical copies are dirt cheap, and the game was recently added to the PlayStation Network for digital download on the PS3 earlier this year.
Give it a chance. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
Review by Francis Morgan
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