Siren (2003) review

I'm more than happy to admit that I'm exaggerating, but this was genuinely one of the most stressful games I've played. The horror is extremely well done here, I don't think there was ever a moment outside of the short cutscenes where I genuinely felt a break from the tension. The game's setting is great, it's not the first horror game to take place in Japan but it does it so damn well. There's a lot of similarities with Silent Hill when it comes to its setting (which tbf is because they share the same creator), where all of the buildings are abandoned and everything is soaked in fog, but honestly I'd argue Siren is better than Silent Hill in that aspect. There's a lot more variety in general. There's the nest which progressively gets bigger and bigger until it just turns into a maze consisting of scaffolding and sheet metal. There's also one of the missions where the sky has a pinkish hue and there's a bunch of fireflies which was honestly really cool to see, you can really tell the team worked their ass off on this game with all the tiny details. There's so many cool tiny little things that you can find that do actually affect the game (which I'll get to later), like they're fucking everywhere, it's actually so much fun putting stuff together in this game just by picking up on subtle cues. Like slowly understanding the concept of the main enemies throughout was fucking CRAZY dude, I LIVE FOR SHIT LIKE THAT, and the world building is GREAT. You can find a bunch of newspaper clippings, letters, food recipes, and artifacts that all get saved into the archive tab where you can read about them and shit. Mind you I'm not a big fan of lore, and I usually skip stuff like that, but when you got me reading a made up NOODLE RECIPE then you're doing something right. There's so much shit about Japanese folklore, scifi, the location you're in, and character information, on EVERYBODY'S SOULS it's so fun reading about that shit. Most of it is related to the game's lore too, and even gives you clues for certain things. Oh and the fucking music is amazing too, it's super unique but it does SO much to help the atmosphere, like you'll hear a bunch of dissonant vocals and throat singing and just a bunch of weird spacey sounds. Yeah I know my description won't make any sense to anybody who hasn't listened to it before, it's something you gotta hear for yourself to know what I mean (TRUST ME IT'S WORTH IT). As for the story, it's confusing at first cos of the disconnected nature of the game, and I REALLY don't wanna give away too much because going through it blind was fucking insane. The game goes from like asian folk horror to just wack ass cosmic horror and it works so damn well, the enemies even reflect that. They start off as zombies called shibito, but they're a bit more than just that. Yeah they're undead and shit but they have their own language, and they retain a schedule from when they were alive. Like one of the shibito used to be an alcoholic police officer, and you can actually take advantage of this by baiting them with a bottle of sake before electrocuting them and stealing their gun. But as the game progresses you start getting introduced to new types of shibito that are more buglike, they'll grow wings or antennas or start making spiderwebs and crawling all over the place. Lemme tell you their late stage designs are fucking SICK, especially the spider shibito. Those genuinely scared me a bunch I hate them so much. The characters are great too, there's like 10 that you play as in game but they're all interesting in general, some of them actually do end up dying and turning into shibito so you actually have to fight them in some missions, which again is fucking awesome. I haven't even gotten to the gameplay itself but it's DAMN good. It differs from a lot of horror games but the way the game is structured is probably the most evident example of such. It's all organized in the link navigator which is basically just a menu that organizes the stages by the day and time that they take place in, along with which one of the 10 characters are being used in them. Each stage has 2 missions, however the 2nd one is unlocked by completing the first mission along with doing a subobjective in a seperate stage (which I'll talk about more later on). The characters you use in the stages don't really have any gameplay differences between them besides general stats and starting items. Which is fine I don't expect any of them to be crazy different from one another but it totally would've been cool to see interesting gimmicks for each one. All of the missions are stealth based, which usually I'm not a fan of cos I am NOT made for stealth, but they're really fun. They start out as "reaching point B" and you'll have to plan out a route in order to get there without the shibito performing an ancient ritual on you known as "beetu de shiru ou o yu". These guys aren't completely stupid either, like yeah if they start chasing you down you're able to shake them off easily, but actually AVOIDING that is really tricky. They're able to spot you really easily and it only takes a few hits to die. Sure you have weapons to your disposal later on and it is really easy to get ahold of the combat, but with the snipers and gunmen scattered all over the place, you're not gonna be able to just kill them all. Even if you do kill some of the shibito they'll come back to life after a while, with some of the other types actually taking less time to revive. With all the fog in this game it's fucking impossible to see anything ahead of you if it weren't for the sightjacking mechanic. Sightjacking is fucking awesome I don't know what else to say, basically you're able to see from anybody's perspective and you can use that to figure out their routes so that you can sneak past them. It works the exact same as one of those old tv sets, with the channels just being the shibito's eyes. Really the only thing I don't like about it is that it's annoying to sightjack the enemy you want since there's a bunch of static inbetween, but once you find them you can just map their perspective to a button and you can switch back to it really quickly, it even saves the button mapping if you ever die. You can even sightjack your partner in any escort mission, rarely do you ever have to use it but it's cool that it's there. Oh yeah I completely forgot that I was talking about the missions earlier, yeah there's some escort missions, but this time they're actually fun. They made it so that it's harder for the shibito to notice your partner so a lot of the time you can just leave them trailing behind, just make sure that they don't die obviously. The only time I actually found the escort missions annoying was when the stage took place in a really cramped area or if you had to escort Miyako. Miyako is blind but she's able to sightjack others characters in the game, so you'll have to turn around to look at her occasionally so that she can find herself and keep following you. It's annoying as fuck but even then you don't have to stop and turn around a bunch. There's only a few of these annoying escort missions too so it's really not that bad. Later on though the missions stop focusing on escaping a certain area and start focusing more on challenges, puzzles, and looking for hidden items. The challenges aren't that bad, they look intimidating at first but I was able to get them done on my 3rd attempt or so, the puzzles and hidden items are a different story though. The way the game is set up is that all of the stages are in a loop, and the only way you can actually break out of said loop is to beat the 2nd mission for a stage. Thankfully you're able to select any stage you want later on but like I said beforehand, in order to unlock the 2nd mission (or even make progress in said mission) for a stage, is that you need to complete a subobjective or collect an item from a previous level. This isn't a bad thing I actually think it's a really cool concept, but the reason why I'm bringing this is up is cos all the puzzles, hidden items, all that shit, is like insanely enigmatic. Like I respect the fuck out of ANYBODY who managed to beat this game without any outside help because I sure as hell couldn't. I have no shame in saying that either, the actual missions themselves yeah I did it myself, but when it came to the other shit HELL NO bro. The game gives hints yeah but they only help so much, I know the manual apparently gives more hints but I only found out about that after I already beat all the missions. Now do I hate this? Not really I was kinda indifferent to it after I found out that it was done on purpose. The whole point in making everything so damn obscure was to get players to discuss in forums and figure out how to beat the game, sorta like what P.T would do in the future. I'd prefer if it wasn't like that just cos it feels like cheating to me but again I don't dislike it, and I'm sure that if I was around when the game released I'd have a lot of fun talking to people about it. Even if you know where everything is and know the answers to the puzzles, there's still some level of challenge since you actually need to get there and that puts you in more risk of getting caught, so yes as insane as the puzzles are, that's the whole point of them so don't feel bad if you ever find yourself googling the answer. Hell sometimes you don't even have to do the puzzle properly, like there was one I know a lot of people talk about where you have to place a piggy bank on a frozen towel so that it would fall down after a minute and distract one of the shibito that had a gun so that you could sneak past him and steal an id. That one gets a LOT of shit, I didn't even know about the towel thing so I just broke the piggy bank right in front of bro, rushed in, died like 50 times before I thought to myself, "hey what if I kicked his ass while he was trying to reload", and that's what I did. You know what happened? I fucking won anyways and honestly it was really satisfying outsmarting the game like that. There was 5 other instances like that too where I would just solve problems in an unconventional way and I think that was the point. You could do what I just did but it'd be a lot harder and take a lot more time, but you could still succeed in it. If you decided to play it smart and searched every little crevice in a stage, you would still win but it'd be faster and less risky. It sounds kinda dumb but it's a really fun rewarding system that doesn't feel easy. Now I can excuse a lot of the shortcomings the game has, nothing is perfect afterall, but the final boss sucked DICK. Like there's no way of getting around it, it just fucking SUCKS. The first phase has you deal with the most obnoxious fucking dude in the whole world, I fucking hate his shit eating grin and his laugh. I HATE HIM. God forbid this motherfucker EVER shuts up because he is such an annoying bastard like holy shit this guy just runs around, shoots you, and then laughs at your face when you die. FUCK THIS GUY, IF I CAN'T KILL HIM I HOPE HE KILLS HIMSELF. But anyways the second phase isn't ANYWHERE near as bad and I like the concept of sightjacking an invisible enemy so that you can find them and hit them, but it's pretty fucking boring to go up against, especially in the 2nd mission of the stage. Again this is like the one thing from Siren that I can't excuse. It's not like they did any of the other bossfights badly either, those were among my favorite missions in the game. They're fun as hell!!! But anyways that's all I gotta say about this game, you can tell the devs poured their hearts out and even though this might be really hard for a lot of people to get into, having the patience for it is absolutely worth it. It's a really tense game that has a great story and some really scary moments, even with how batshit insane the puzzles are they're still really cool and I absolutely ADORE timeloops in video games. Siren is super memorable overall and I fw it HEAVY. 

WHO DID THE YOUNG PEOPLE PICK AS THEIR LEADER? NBA YOUNGBOY TAMON TAKEUCHI.
Rating: 8.7/10