Heed the Sound
Siren: Blood Curse will genuinely scare the pants off you... just be ready for the controls to do the same.
Published: August 10, 2008
Siren does absolutely fulfill the idea of episodic content, but it does so only after you've been forced to deal with clunky controls that make you interact with things in smallish boxes (sometimes those interaction boxes are way, way too obscure to let you figure them out beyond some trial and error), and with characters that aren't even fully fleshed out before the end -- and even then some of them are throwaway.
It's a game made to be a TV show that doesn't quite get the idea of a TV show -- especially in how things are set up, control-wise. Maybe that's my frustration. This actually does start to feel like a TV show as you play through it, but it's not structured in such a way that the key parts are front-loaded. The story is there, yes, delivered piecemeal enough that you just want to find out what the hell is going on, but the gameplay is a little too staggered. Once you "get" it, it's better to be sure, but that also means suffering through a few lame chapters -- some of which are (and I shit you not), all of five minutes.
Now granted, those are early on, and the game does a magnificent job of sloooooowly stretching things out to the point where you do care about the characters, but I can't help but feel like the game weighted things a bit too close to the middle to really get horror fans. You will see some utterly... well, yes, I'm going to use the phrase "fucked up" since our site is made for adults, but yes, it's pretty nuts. And honestly, that's one of the best things that Siren has going for it: it's fucked up.
And in a beautiful way. I don't mean that graphically; the game is actually a little stark on details, most of which are buried under the game's gross insistence on caving in detail by pulling back the visible spectrum in stark contrast to how some filmmakers blow things out to hide detail. This really is the inverse to that. Shadow hides almost everything (though not the fact that the motion-captured actors are woefully stiff and wooden in their sessions), but it does it in a way that makes you pray for some random shaft of visibility or some odd burst of detail. Normally I hate when a game hides detail, but this is done both purposefully and tactfully.
The game can't quite be said for the motion-captured animations in the game. It's pretty obvious when things were taken from human input and thrown into the game versus were the human hand came into play. It's fairly ironic, really. I don't doubt that most of the game is mo-capped in the way it handles animations, but the cutscenes, usually meant to instill some life into these digital characters, tends to fall flat, leaving them jerky and pan-handed.
