First Impressions - Siren: New Translation

Much to my delight, I recently received my hard copy of Siren: New Translation in the mail. You see, I had to import the damn thing since Sony seems to be hell-bent on pissing off at least some people all of the time. Anyways, now I can play it, which makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. I actually played the demo when it first arrived in the Japanese store, but for whatever reason, it didn’t instantly grab me the way the final product did. Maybe I just wasn’t in a survival horror mood, or I could have been in the middle of playing a bunch of other stuff – who knows. But for a first impression, the Siren I’m playing now nailed it from the get-go.

The game starts off with a suitably creepy home video-like perspective of some bizarre killings being performed by people in hooded clothing. The people behind the camera are part of a news crew who are on a supposedly deserted island in Japan. Why they’re there, I’m not really sure at this point. What I do know is that they soon find themselves on the run from the disturbing locals, and they’re none too happy about it. The game takes a really interesting approach in the way its levels are spread out – each chapter is broken up into episodes, just like a TV show, and so far each episode lasts between 5 - 15 minutes. You play as different characters, and switching between them during the episodes gives a unique perspective to the way the story plays out. One episode has you playing as a high school student, while another starts you off as one of the TV crewmen. Each person seems to play the same, but I’m guessing the developers opted for multiple characters as a way of fleshing out the story in an interesting and different way than what's normally seen from games in this genre (or any genre, for that matter).


With Siren being a survival horror game, the atmosphere needs to have a certain dread in the air, and it certainly has that in spades. Some of the characters carry flashlights, but even with them turned on, you can’t see very far in front of you. Everything is near pitch-black, and ambient noises from within the blackness surrounding you add to the creepy-as-shit vibe the game has going for it. You can also hear the mumblings and crazy laughter from the zombie-like enemies in every direction, and a lot of the time you don’t know where they are until you’re right on top of them. That is, until you get the “sight-jacking” ability. “Sight jacking” allows you to see from the enemies’ perspectives, and the mechanic is implemented with a vertical split-screen – the normal third-person view of your character on the left, and the first-person viewpoint of an enemy on the right. You might think it would get confusing, but I found it to be a really cool effect, and it’s also pretty damn useful. I used it one time to wait for a guy to turn a corner, and as he walked away, I beat him about ten times in the back of the head with a shovel. It was awesome. That’s not to say you can run around beating people with gardening tools all the time – your best bet is to avoid contact as much as possible, because they can fuck you up pretty bad if they get a chance. When you’re nearby an enemy, the controller vibrates a bit and you can hear a heartbeat sound that can only mean bad things. Once they’ve spotted you, the screen turns all kinds of trippy colors, and pants are shat as you run away like a little girl. By “you,” I mean me. And by “run away like a little girl,” I mean just that. What you often find yourself doing is running into a house to hide in the closet or under a bed or something. Your pursuer follows you, and you can see them searching for you from the safety (or lack thereof) of your hiding spot. Once they leave, it’s up to you to either stay put or book it the fuck out of there. So far every encounter like that has been insanely tense, and I can’t see the mechanic wearing thin any time soon.

Overall, Siren has really impressed me. I wasn’t sure how it would fare, since I actually have the original PS2 version of the game, and I found it really hard to control. The controls in the new version still hamper your movement in a lot of regards, but not to the point of the fun being taken away. I’m a firm believer that for a survival horror game to be genuinely effective, you have to feel – at least on some level – totally helpless. Siren does just that, and if the suspense can sustain itself over the course of the entire game, I might have just found my new favorite series. Fatal Frame is one of my all-time favorites, but the next entry is on the Wii, so fuck that. Luckily for me, Siren seems able enough to take the place of that once great franchise, and gives me a new reason to turn the lights off again.