The original Silent Hill games felt like lightning in a bottle. Team Silent was a ragtag group of developers within Konami who were looking to create something different in the horror space. While the entire team would be disbanded by Konami after the fourth entry, the director of the original Silent Hill, Keiichiro Toyama, departed the team on his own accord right after its initial release to form his own team under Japan Studio. Called Project Siren, his next project wouldn’t become a household name on the level of Silent Hill, but Siren has become something of a cult classic in the decades since its release. It even earned itself a cameo in Astro Bot, which may have been a tricky one to identify for most.
With interest in Silent Hill reinvigorated thanks to the impressive Silent Hill 2 remake and Siren being added to the Classics collection on PS5 — and with Halloween right around the corner — this is the perfect game to scratch that psychological horror itch. Whereas Silent Hill games feel more like refinements in a core concept through different characters’ perspectives, Siren attempts to expound upon horror in a grander way while still giving that distinct Silent Hill flavor. Just like the original games, however, it isn’t without a few warts.
Nonlinear horror
Siren eschews the traditional format of linear horror games and instead divides itself up into 10 distinct, interconnected parts. Rather than playing as a single protagonist, you will control 10 different characters over the course of a 72-hour period, each of whom has their own objectives and motivations for coming to the haunted town of Hanuda.
However, the series of events you experience are not presented in chronological order, and certain actions you do or do not take as one character can impact what happens when you control someone else. The game will loop itself until you can find the right series of events to resolve the story by thinking four-dimensionally across every character.
I initially found this setup confusing when I played it on the PS2, as the game does a poor job of explaining why you are being sent back to already completed stages. However, the added Link Navigator does make going back through any previous stage easy once you learn to decode its confusing layout and color-coded grid. Upon revisiting it, I have come to appreciate how the shifting perspectives and looping narrative build toward feeling like a real nightmare; I will never escape until I master my fear and find my own path through.
The plot itself is a fascinating web of folklore, occultism, and mysterious supernatural powers. I became deeply invested in slowly piecing together the dark history of Haruda and its people through notes and environmental clues. Finding new pieces of the puzzle helped ease the monotony that would’ve otherwise set in while repeating levels for a second or third time. As is the case with Silent Hill, Siren gave me plenty of room to theorize and revise my understanding of events up until (and even beyond) the conclusion.
The aspect of Siren I am more conflicted about is its gameplay.
On a basic level, it is a third-person, stealth-focused horror experience. You will lead your current character through one of 10 sections of Haruda, collecting clues and items and avoiding the primary enemy called Shibito. These are zombie-like enemies who stumble around the dark searching for you, but aren’t at all mindless — they will wield melee and firearms to hunt you and will do a good job of chasing you down. Most of the time, your character will be unarmed, though you can find some melee weapons and a rare firearm. However, combat is punished in almost every circumstance. Shibito will deal lethal damage in just one or two hits, and it would be generous to call your combat abilities janky. Swings have odd timing, terrible range, and long recovery times that heavily encourage you to stick to stealth.
Where Siren stands apart from any other survival horror game is the Sightjack ability. Instead of only relying on your limited vision and audio cues to sneak past Shibito, all your characters have the power to see through the eyes of nearby NPCs, both friendly and hostile. Seeing a monster approaching in the dark, or bumping into one rounding a corner for a jump scare are effective, but familiar ways to evoke fear. But closing your character’s eyes, only to see yourself being stalked by an enemy you didn’t realize was there elicited a unique type of panic I had never felt before. It stirred up memories of horror stories I had heard about people going camping by themselves and later discovering a photo of them that was taken while they were asleep. Only in Siren, the fear wasn’t just creeping, but immediate.
Frustrating puzzles
Puzzles are core to the horror genre, and Siren is no exception. I always get a bit nervous when encountering my first puzzle in a horror game due to how delicately they need to be handled in order to not break the tension. Unfortunately, Siren’s puzzles are almost universally unintuitive to the point of frustration. It borders on the type of logic people joke about with old point-and-click games, as it’s nearly impossible to naturally intuit the intended solution. A tame example would be a puzzle requiring you to drop a light bulb down a garbage chute to make a Shibito to investigate. Afterward, you need to drop an EEG machine down the shoot onto its head to incapacitate it, which are hardly the two uses I would ever imagine using those specific items for.
The only saving grace to these puzzles is that there’s no way to fail. Instead, you will either need to get lucky, look up the answer, or resort to using every item with every interactable object in the environment until you get a response. It would be a minor blemish in any other game, but horror titles like Siren rely so heavily on immersion that these puzzles end up dragging down its strongest moments. If you do plan on visiting Siren, this is one instance where using a puzzle guide will only enhance the experience.
Siren feels very much like that original Silent Hill in spirit. It is rough around the edges and a little obtuse, but offers an experience nothing else does in quite the same way. Siren 2 — and the PS3 reimagining called Siren: Blood Curse — still delivers a brand of Japanese horror wholly its own. I think that unique flair makes it something that will never have mass appeal, but it will hit that much harder for those who connect with it.
Siren is available now on PS Plus for Premium subscribers.