Siren

"Scary, certainly…"

Siren (Forbidden Siren in Europe) was designed by Keiichiro Toyama (if I am not wrong), who was also the director of the first Silent Hill (I am sorry but I am going to talk about Silent Hill a lot, but this game has so much in common that is hard not compare), as I was saying, this game was also designed by him, only that, sadly, comparing this game with Silent Hill is like comparing monkey dung with a chocolate bar…. Ok ok, it is not THAT bad, but it is pretty bad game in my opinion, and even more considering how good it could have easily been.

Plot:
As usual in these kind of games, the plot starts quite good and has a lot of potential, in short, it is something like this: the villagers of the Hanyuda village have all become zombie-like things called Shibitos due to some strange rituals and a very creepy river whose water has suddenly turned out completely red. However, there is a bunch of survivors, survivors whose task now is to find out what the heck is going on.

This is plot, and our mission is to guide the survivors to a safely place, that is, far away from the village and their inhabitants (if we can call them inhabitants). A very interesting idea at first glance as you can see, but at first glance only I’m afraid, because due to the gameplay, this promising plot is not enough to save this game.

Graphics:
Dated, even the second Silent Hill had better visuals (I don’t mean Silent Hill 2’s graphics were bad, only that considering that Silent Hill 2 is older, it has much better visuals). Anyway, in these games the graphics are not as important as the overall mood, and here is where Siren succeeds, without being not nearly as gory and violent as Silent Hill, you will probably feel as scared as like if you were playing one of those Konami’s games, take that for granted. Sadly, as I am going to try to explain later, the gameplay is made in such a way that after some time the game is not creepy anymore. Too bad.

Siren is fully in 3D, without CG sequences or anything like that, and again like Silent Hill, Siren makes use of fog both to enhance the creepy atmosphere and to keep unnoticed as much as possible its graphical imperfections. For me, I repeat, this is not a problem, and they could have passed unnoticed were it not for some features like the possibility to use a first person view, this way you can see how poorly made are some things that with the normal view look ok. But again, the graphics are very suitable for the game, so I guess we can’t say Siren has very good graphics.

Something that I liked a lot is that this is a very Japanese game, everything takes place in a typical little Japanese village, the characters are made using real faces (like those multiplayer games where you can scan you own face and use it with mods in most first person shooters), there are references to a lot of Japanese legends, tales, and things like that. If you don’t care about these things then this is something unimportant, obviously, but for those, like me, who like more or less everything that comes out of Japan this is really nice because normally typical Japanese “things” never use to cross the Japanese shores.

So the graphics are far from being spectacular, but being Siren the game it is, they work perfectly.

Music:
Siren has a lot more music than the usual game in the genre, of course this doesn’t make this one a game we can call “musically interesting“, but together with the great mood, the few melodies manage to enhance even more the creepy atmosphere (at least until you find out how boring everything else is). Of course there is only music during certain parts of that game, and most of the time you are not going to hear anything, like in any other game in the genre, but when there is, it is very good, both creepy and charming, which you will see that is scarier.

There is voice acting also, but I can’t say anything because I played the Spanish version. Normally games in Spanish suck like the most putrid pile of garbage imaginable, but this one has a quite good voice acting, so I assume the English one has to be quite good, but again, I don’t know, and there aren’t so many voices in any case. The best thing here is when the Shibitos growl and talk non senses, you are not going to understand a thing, but that is going to scare the hell out of you very badly.

Gameplay:
Here is where our Siren stops breathing and sinks, Siren, or Forbidden Siren, or whatever you want to call it is not your typical survival horror game, in fact it is closer to Metal Gear a lot more than to Silent Hill if we pay more attention on its gameplay, and this is mainly because the game is divided in missions, yes, missions with primary and secondary objectives and where most of the time the best way to survive is finding a good place to hide in order be as unnoticed as possible. The mission objectives are things like: escape from here, do this and that, find this, take this person to a safe place, etc.

This is the first flaw in the game, the second one comes when we find out that there is more than one main playable character, in fact, not only there is more than one, there are like seven playable characters, and each one has its mission with its own objectives and with its own story. What is the problem then?, it seems like a nice idea!, well, probably, but this way, as we are constantly going to be switching between characters, it is hard to get involved with them, and what s worst, we can’t explore and enjoy the story.

Why exactly?, here is what I think: the true big problem with them is that we are going to replay the same mission a lot of times, if we can’t find out what to do to beat the secondary objectives then we will have to beat that mission only with the already achieved primary objective, and that means the next stage is going to be, again, an already beaten stage only that using another character, something very boring and annoying. Due to this, the story goes on very slowly, you will forget about what was happening, about who you are, who the guy you have next to you is, and ultimately, why are you playing.

These are, mainly, the reasons why I dislike this game so much, why I didn’t enjoyed this game, what I like about survival horror games is to explore, and in this game exploring is not possible, in the end everything ends up being like in a stealth game, this is, replaying the mission a hundred times to know exactly what to do, this way is no fun, not to mention instead of being scared of the monsters you will end up very tired of them.

Anyway, these are not the only flaws in the game, there are a lot more, you can bet whatever you want about that. The puzzles for example, they are ridiculous, they don’t make any sense, the objects we have to use to make traps and things like that are completely out of place, and if we find out how to do something then that is just luck, or because there aren’t too many objects to use.

The controls are also a lo more like one of these stealth games rather than a horror title, the only good thing about them is that they are easier to master, more or less five seconds is enough time to play properly, and we have a lot more freedom to move the camera around us, something that is not as good as it may seem (though for me this is not good by any means, as an old school player, in my opinion this game should have had a fixed camera, like 90% of the games out there, specially rpgs). The combats for example sometimes are very dangerous, and there is a couple of reasons why, the first one is that the Shibitos are very slow and silent creatures, and with all the fog it is really hard to see them coming (they also entirely white, so it is even easier not to see them coming across the fog), so normally, if you don run, they are going to surprise and hurt you a lot, then we have weapons that are hard to use, like some shotguns, that can only be use with a first person view and that are very slow, so we have to run back and find a good place to shot, finally our characters are very weak, we don’t have a health bar but with two or three hits they are history.

The enemies are very annoying, they cannot be killed (yes, they never die, never) and they know how to use weapons, including pistols and shotguns, and remember that I said that this game was like a Metal Gear?, well, this is the proof of it: during the game there are lots, tons of enemies with shotguns shooting from strategic positions, and if we want to keep going we will have kill them from behind or from a safe position, or simply crawling behind them without making noise, was it possible to do this in any other survival horror game?, I guess not.

Another flaw about them is that there isn’t too much variety, as they are nothing more and nothing less than ordinary townsfolk from the cursed village, their variety consists on them wearing different outfits or weapons (hats, hoods, uniforms, guns, scythes…), but they are always the same enemies, pale ghost-zombie-corpse-like things, creepy, very creepy, that is undeniable, but after some time you’ll get used and bored of them.

Something that a first is pretty interesting is that our characters have the ability to read minds and with that power they are also able to see where are the enemies and what they are doing, so before trying to do something you will have to see if there is an enemy coming or what, which is another “stealth game” feature if you think carefully. Yeah this sounds interesting I know, but wasting an hour doing this just to get killed by the last enemy on the stage and having to replay the entire mission again is truly exasperating, believe me, so most of the time the strategy is simple, dying a lot of times to see where is the danger.

Difficulty:
Hard, definitely, the missions require a lot of “try agains”, then, some characters lack weapons so we will have to be constantly hiding and running, if we are caught, it is the end. If we also add completely illogical puzzles, the fact that our mission objectives are repetitive, that the enemies cannot be killed, and that we are going to get lots a lot, we have an explosive combination frustration and monotony, something that enhances the difficulty A LOT.

My conclusion:
This game has a lot of wasted potential, it s probably the most frightening non Silent Hill game (at least until you get bored because of the gameplay), a lot more than, for example Fatal Frame (or Project Zero) or any Resident evil (though in my opinion Resident Evil is more an action game), but the way it is done is not very appropriate for the genre, then the gameplay together with the huge quantity of characters make the plot slow and uninteresting. I didn’t like the game in the end, and in my opinion those that after Silent Hill 3 are looking for something similar are going to feel ripped off with this game, so I would rent it first.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/04