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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Siren is an exercise in pure frustration, with completely unsolvable puzzles and enemies who will consistently kill you instantly before you even realize they're around.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: There are a few points in the game where mid-level checkpoints do more harm than good by not preserving the completion of certain tasks should you die.
Why I Like It Anyway: For what it is, Siren is an amazing, deeply satisfying game. What it is however is a Stealth/Horror game which is a decidedly unforgiving experience in terms of action, puzzle solving, and the perpetual level of dread involved. Everything about the game which makes it so enjoyable for those who appreciate challenge would easily alienate anyone who prefers most of their games to be breezy, straight-forward experiences.
Siren, while not explicitly presented at such, was created by Silent Hill's Keiichiro Toyama, and largely exists to expand on elements of the first game which Silent Hill 2 and onward let slip out of focus to concentrate on psychological character studies. The basic premise of the game is rather refreshingly straight forward for a horror game, and spelled out more or less right up front. We have a small isolated mountain village, in which the vast majority of the population have become more or less traditional, George Romero style zombies, clearly due to supernatural causes connected to their strange local religion. All ten of the game's protagonists, right from the start, have the very basic goal of getting away from this zombie filled town as quickly as possible.
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This leads into the first distinctive aspect of Siren. While a typical horror gameis presented as a single contiguous chunk of gameplay, generally lasting for only a few hours if one can avoid dying and bring themselves to play straight through, Siren is divided up into a shockingly huge number of short little scenes lasting only a few minutes each, but easily totaling over 20 hours of gameplay. A detailed in-game timeline is filled in as the game progresses, much like in Odin Sphere, showing every playable scene and cutscene for each of the many characters. After playing through a scene, the game returns to the timeline view, and shifting over to another scene which makes narrative sense to follow it. Sometimes the focus remains on the same character, sometimes the perspective shifts to someone at the opposite end of town at the same time, and sometimes the player's perspective will be shot back in time a fair bit, to show an explanation of how a baffling discovery came to be.
Eventually, the timeline view begins to double as a level select feature, whereby the player can revisit any scene in the game. At this point, the overall goal of the game becomes unlocking every scene to get the full story, by replaying earlier scenes and accomplishing new objectives. With the exception of the introduction, every scene in the game has a secondary objective that becomes available after first completing it, where aside from just getting from point A to point B alive, something else must be accomplished, which will be of benefit to other characters later, thus opening a new scene. For example, while the first objective in an area may just be to escape to a safer location, the secondary objective might be to first create a safe path through a dangerous area so others who pass by can follow. Sometimes it's even as simple as making sure to finish a scene in a short enough time to see another character passing by the area. Many of these secondary objectives however cannot be completed without meeting some condition elsewhere. Breaking the lock off a box for instance might first require it to have been weakened by someone passing through earlier with a sturdier weapon, or lighting a series of beacons may require you to have first found a box of candles elsewhere. These puzzles are rather off-putting to some, but the solutions can be worked out without too much trouble just by checking back over what the current character did earlier, or which other characters passed through the same area earlier. The game is also kind enough to point out when a character's actions enable something in another scene, and even give hints that there's such a discovery to be made in advance now and then.
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As previously mentioned, the real meat here, and the primary goal for the vast majority of the game, is for various characters to make their way through areas plagued by roaming zombies, in search of at least relative safety. While the zombies are significantly slower than the various survivors, and easily distracted by bright lights and loud noises, they possess two significant advantages which make stealth highly advantageous when not outright mandatory. First, no zombie can ever actually be killed. The best that can be hoped for is knocking one unconscious for a brief and highly random period of time. Second, they are rather consistently better armed. While just about everyone makes it a point to correct the problem as early as possible, of the ten characters played throughout the game, only two have any means of defending themselves when first introduced. Then even when a character does have a gun or a nice solid bludgeon, the zombies typically have something better. It's actually quite common to come across rooftops, bridges, and towers being actively patrolled by zombified rednecks toting rifles. While being killed by zombie snipers is a rather novel experience, avoiding it often requires the use of clever distractions and a fair deal of hiding.
This leads us towards the other unique gimmick of Siren. While most stealth games give the player a significant edge over their enemies in the form of a detailed radar system, constantly alerting the player to the presence of nearby enemies, Siren doesn't even do the courtesy of marking your position when looking at the map screen. Furthermore, as with the Silent Hill games, particularly the first in which navigating in the dark was actually practical at times, zombies will very easily spot you if you wander about everywhere with your flashlight turned on. In fairness however, their own night vision is less than stellar, and patrolling zombies will typically have flashlights of their own.
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As effective as hiding in the shadows can be, it's still impossible to progress in a stealth based game without knowing where sentries are looking before you proceed, and Siren's solution to this is quite interesting. As a side effect of the supernatural activity turning everyone into zombies, those who have yet to turn are granted the ability to look through the eyes of anyone around them. Hitting the "sight-jack" button yields a screen full of static, from which one can probe around with the joystick and eventually focus in on a first person view of anyone in the area. While rather disorienting at first, with practice it becomes easy to stay out of sight by checking firsthand where exactly a given zombie is prone to look. There's some other fun to be had with the premise at times too, such as the scenes where someone must escort a blind girl around, periodically having to turn back and look at her so she can navigate by watching herself through your eyes.
The sight-jacking mechanic is also the primary vector of horror in the game, as looking at the world through the eyes of a zombie trying to find and kill you is downright nerve-wracking. There is, of course, the obvious practical concern that your character is left totally defenseless and you hopefully are unaware of what's going on around them while you're checking the perspective of your enemies. Then there's the intensity of hiding in a closet or behind a fence and hoping the Sam Raimi style monster-cam doesn't find the right corner to peek around. Mainly though, the problem is that with your viewpoint in the head of a zombie, you have to listen to it. In addition to some unsettling heavy breathing which becomes more labored when something catches their attention, Siren's zombies are surprisingly chatty. While their voices are usually too distorted to make anything out, they'll greet each other with cheerful exchanges, or laugh quite loudly at nothing in particular. Then of course there are those rare exceptions to the rule, where in dealing with someone they used to know, a zombie will speak so clearly and lucidly as to still seem alive. Dealing with their voices is arguably bad enough that it's much less stressful to play the game blind and deal with constantly dying than to go the careful route.
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What really makes Siren impressive, beyond the length and interesting gimmicks, are the subtle changes that take place with the characters and setting over time. One of my favorite characters for instance is the doctor. He starts off lost and wandering in the woods having crashed his car. It's decidedly unsafe where he is, but the only two paths out are guarded by some of those wonderful zombie snipers, and the only weapon he's able to obtain is a wrench from his trunk. While the game will generally leave you to discover it on your own, the only way out is to set a trap, hide in the bushes, rush out and bash a sniper over the head then run before he recovers. Having had to do that, he acquires a bit of a taste for that sort of thing. After a few more levels force further trick-and-bash tactics, he eventually develops into a full on bloodthirsty psycho, eventually getting mission objectives where he's actively hunting down his old girlfriend for sport and vivisecting zombies to see how they tick. Not an uncommon sort of character arc, but what's impressive is how he grows into the person he is by the end of the game almost entirely from traumatic activities the player is forced to devise as puzzle solutions. This is largely par for the course, with other examples including the "mama bear" of an elementary school teacher, and someone who develops a downright homicidal level of annoyance with a piece of dead weight he has to escort through one of the more annoying levels.
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There's a fair deal of fun to be had with the environment as well. The 32 scenarios that make up the game (each of which having two objectives) all take place within the same nine regions of the village and its surroundings. Between all the revisiting and the inability to really navigate using the very spartan map screen, one becomes intimately familiar with the town after a point. This makes it all the more unsettling when things take on a different look later in the game, much more subtley than Silent Hill's dramatic shifts to the "otherworld" version of things. Most zombies encountered in the game, particularly during the many portions where your character is unarmed, will be largely engaged in simple attempts at living their ordinary lives. You'll see zombies working in gardens, visiting restaurants, and in one particularly memorable level, going about a normal day at home, chopping happily at a cutting board for a while before taking a break to laugh at a TV showing static. It's generally assumed over the course of the game that such things are just a convenient and amusing excuse for zombies to divert their attention from areas one must pass through since, again, this is primarily a stealth game. As time passes however, all the various zombies about town independently engaging in the fairly common task of absently nailing planks of wood together begin to have projects running into each other. Eventually the whole town has been converted to an insane, claustrophobic maze of wooden ramps and tunnels, just arbitrary enough to leave one wondering if there's a central intelligence directing them or it's just the result of perpetual random carpentry.
A sequel to Siren was released only in Japan and Europe, not particularly connected plot wise and focusing on a handful of survivors dealing with a similar situation on a remote island. It mixes things up some by giving characters unique special powers, and more or less abandons the premise that no zombie can be permanently killed, just stunned for a short period, going as far as to allow their typically superior weapons to be looted after knocking them out. There's also a remake of the original game available on the PS3. On the one hand, it features the rather novel gimmick of being an "Americanized" remake, replacing most of the cast with an American documentary crew, making things more action packed, and generally mirroring the changes found in the American versions of movies like The Ring and The Grudge over the originals. On the other hand, it's much easier and more straight-forward, merging characters and storyline together, dropping the time line gimmick, and hacking out a large portion of the game, leaving only 24 playable sections, roughly half of which are retreads, vs. 64 in the original. It also makes what remains a fair deal easier, with abundant weapons, a split-screen approach to sight-jacking, and a much more friendly map screen and hint system. Both of these would seem to be solid games in their own right, but the most intense experience to be had with the series is clearly in the original.
