Siren: Blood Curse

After all the whining about the survival horror genre being dead last year, even though I say it isn't, I figured I’d give Siren: Blood Curse a try. It was the one game that constantly came up as the anomaly while everyone bitched that the genre devolved into action shooters. Well now that I have played through all 12 episodes for the low low price of 11 dollars, thanks Slevin, I can now safely say I’m glad the genre is dead.

Clearly no one knows how to make a solid game using the clever horror mechanics created in the mid 90’s. Siren has all the things that made Japanese horror games from last decade scary, but it also has all the things that made them infuriatingly annoying. First off, the controls are just stupid. For most of the game two of the face buttons are never used, and R2 isn’t ever touched. Yet, several commands are still mapped to an onscreen menu that pops up whenever you push a direction on the d-pad. If that doesn’t seem unnecessary, the menu simply tells you what direction on the d-pad to push in order to do an action. In order to yell, you have to push a d-pad direction for it to tell you to push left on the d-pad to yell. It’s always left, but you still have to press two buttons to make it happen.

Another thing, in order to climb a ladder, or a chest high wall, or to jump a small gap, or hop off a short roof, you simply run straight into the obstacle. You’ll end up running in place for about a second before the game realizes what you are doing, then the next animation will start. This sounds fine in practice, but when you are running from monsters trying to navigate rooftops it quickly becomes cumbersome. The worst instance of this is when trying to run past an enemy in a narrow hallway. Something the game asks of you quite often. You end up running in place for a second before shoving or sliding past them. This is almost always enough time to for the slow moving monster to initiate a rabid mauling of you. Now you get to flail the SIXAXIS around like a coked up ferret in order to kick it off you. Best part of all is you'll almost certainly kick him right back into the narrow hallway you need to run through. Maybe this time you’ll squeeze past, or more likely, you'll repeat the process two more times and then die.

The controls seem like they are trying to be simplistic, but just come off as archaic and unforgiving. There is a lot of context sensitive button presses that if not timed or lined up perfectly end up resulting in a different action altogether. I don’t know how many times I fell off the edge of something because I was too far away to pull the girl I was escorting up to me, but getting even a smidgen closer was enough to put me over. And don’t even get me started on the escort missions.

While the controls are tedious and as far as I’m concerned, a surefire way to ruin any game no matter what how good its other aspects are, I think Siren’s biggest fault is it isn’t scary. So much of the gameplay is trial and error that I, at least, was practically playing with the intention of dying to see what not to do next time. Any mission that didn’t immediately give me a weapon was spent trying to figure out what the game specifically wanted me to do. This ended up being far more frustrating than scary, and it was more puzzle solving than surviving. Once I did acquire a weapon I was pretty much unstoppable. If it was a weaponless mission, once I got the pattern down there was no real worry of dying, and besides, dying half a dozen times to figure out the pattern sort of dulls the effect once you are ready to go for the win.

The game isn’t all bad though. It has a very polished presentation, and a very creepy atmosphere. The lighting effects are good, despite the monsters being totally oblivious to your flashlight, and the whole game has sort of a grainy filter that helps set the mood. The graphics aren’t the best, but they are more than adequate, and the monsters play off the "used to be human" scare tactic remarkably well. Especially when you see the monster version of a character you used to play as. This sort of becomes problematic later however, because major characters seem to switch between monster and human between missions with no real indication as to why. The story is a trainwreck that never really makes sense all the way through its bizarre, but awesome looking final boss fight. Guess this still ended up being a pretty negative paragraph, but the game does look good. Also Sight Jacking, splitting the screen between what you see and what an enemy or ally sees, is a fairly clever idea. Though it hardly ends up being useful. Dammit, well I tried to keep it about the good, maybe I can throw in a few plusses for good measure. +++

Like I said above, the game adheres to the old way of making horror games, but keeps all the annoying problems as well. The controls are terrible, the story is convoluted and confusing, the goals are either so specific that the fear is lost, or they are so vague that you come to terms with failing in order to progress and the whole thing just forms something far more frustrating than scary. If that’s what survival horror is all about then I’ll take Dead Space any day of the week.