Review
Games Without Boxes Reviews Siren: Blood Curse
August 01, 2008
Siren: Blood Curse, the PS3’s exclusive downloadable rural Japanese freakout, arrives already carved to bits, twelve pieces to be exact. In this case we’re talking about episodic content (between Siren and Dexter, is this the new shotgun?). Siren feels like a totally new style of game experience, more like a horror TV series and you’ll have to pay for the experience. A four-episode pack goes for nearly fifteen bucks a pop or forty bucks for the whole thing. The pricing definitely has a twinge of an adversarial feel. Sony can get into your wallet for an extra $25 bones if you go the a la carte route. When you’re toying with making the purchase keep in mind this is a sequential episodic storyline, not twelve separate games.
Set in the creepy nighttime and dusky forests and towns of rural Japan, the atmosphere is astonishingly horrifying, and definitely console-quality. Of course, this game is basically a downloadable Blu-Ray game—episodes run nearly a gig a piece, making it a huge burden on your HDD. Thankfully, you can erase and re-download episodes later (though downloads themselves can take over an hour).
As a series of Americans visiting and filming a mysteriously cursed village full of creepy undead, you shift perspective and follow multiple storylines while employing the ability to target anyone—living or undead—and see what they’re seeing. The split-screen psychedelia is trippy. Running around and solving tasks and puzzles, often in rainy night environments with the entire cast of The Ring chasing you, is enough to set anyone on edge.
Despite the file sizes, each episode runs pretty short. Wrapping up each episode is a trailer for the next, giving a cool television series vibe. The dialogue, though feeling at times awkwardly translated, might win the award for the most “fuck”s and “shit”s peppered in a video game. But the experience, if you’re into scaring the…well…shit out of yourself during your downtime, shouldn’t be missed. Siren: Blood Curse is a big step for games without boxes, showing that we’re rapidly approaching the day where we might get top-notch console titles online-only. If only we had a few more terabytes of hard drive space.
DAS VERDICT: A solid buy for splatterfiends willing to go all in for the $40 up front. Stick with the demo if you’re on the fence.
The technical info:
Siren: Blood Curse
Studio: SCE Japan
Publisher: SCEA
PS3 / PSN exclusive
–Scott Stein
One Response to “Games Without Boxes Reviews Siren: Blood Curse”
Undead Japs are almost as scary as live ones. I do like the language though. I love it when they talk dirty. Made me want sushi.
By chubbylover69 on Aug 3, 2008