Siren:Blood Curse - the better Silent Hill
Siren:Blood Curse is an old school survival horror game and features horrible controls, an atrocious camera and a perplexing story. But unlike other genres this actually helps to set the mood in this game, because you sometimes feel very helpless.
The story of Siren:Blood Curse revolves around an American TV crew, that came to Hanuda village to film footage for their paranormal TV show, and Howard Wright, an American student studying in Japan who came to Hanuda village by accident on a biking trip. It starts of with a ritual shown mostly off screen, that goes wrong and now the local townsfolk are turned into Shibito, creatures similiar to zombies but even after you knock them out they shortly come back to life to come after you. So in the game you are constantly running away from them.
The game is split up into episode, which are then split up into multiple chapters. Each episode also ends with a short preview of the next episode. At one point in production the game was planned to be episodically, but they somehow cancelled that and released all episodes at once. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to release it on blu-ray, because 9GB at once are quite a lot for the small PS3 HDDs. (I personally don't care, because I swapped it for a 250GB one.)
Unlike most games the character you are controlling is switched after almost every chapter. This makes the whole story a lot more like a TV series and also changes up the gameplay to keep it fresh. For example playing as the 10 year old little girl you don't have any choice but to run away from the Shibito or playing as the Japanese doctor from the village, who always carries a double-barrel shotgun around with him you won't have to fear the Shibito very much.
After a short while into the game, your characters gain the ability to Sight Jack.When you use Sight Jack the screen is split up into two and on the right side you can see through the eyes of another person. This is actually really helpful, since you can see where that person is and what it is doing. Using Sight Jack you can evade enemies much easier or get bonus information such as an item taking by the enemy can easily be found by locking unto his sight and then follow after seeing, where he went.
The enemy design in this game is fantastic. The normal Shibito look mostly like normal people, but their faces look really messed up and their skintone is grey. But there are also bigger abominations and flying shibito, that have grown big flea wings out of their backs.
What makes the Shibito really scary for me is that they actually live like normal people. In one chapter you are in a small house with a family of Shibito. After sitting together in the living room and being excited about the white noise coming out of the TV, they all leave to do some other things. The father goes to sleep while the daughter goes into her room to listen to some music.
The story is incredible perplexing and filled with WTF moments, but after about two thirds into the game everything becomes a lot clearer and after checking some info you collected in your archive, there aren't very many mysteries left and you have a good idea, what has happened in the game.
Siren:Blood Curse was released on the PlayStationNetwork for $40 or as three packs a $15. The game is well worth it, although it is rather short. (I finished it in about 8 hours.)
