Forbidden Siren review (PS2)

Horror can be a difficult thing to engineer in any medium. Suspension of disbelief, never an easy thing to achieve, is practically required. In the medium of video games, where we are all too aware of the mechanics behind our experience, we are rarely gullible enough to be scared.

Forbidden Siren is a bold attempt at a new kind of video game horror. The player is invited into a different level of involvement than that of most other horror games. Thus a new game mechanic is introduced, one that lets you ‘scan’ your surroundings with the analogue stick as if tuning a radio. Each ‘channel’ that opens to you is the perspective of one of your enemies. This mechanic, “sight jacking” enables you to both plan a safe route and at times, observe your own impending death.

This brings the stealth element of the gameplay to the fore and is an obvious device to unsettle the player. But is it a horror device that works towards the atmosphere of the game as a whole?

Urban legends

As an example in Silent Hill, an earlier work of Forbidden Siren’s director, the game worked against what most players expected. The protagonist was deliberately slow and weak in combat, creating a sense of frustration, which is now common to survival horror games, echoing Resident Evil’s claustrophobic camera angles and scarcity of ammo.

Silent Hill’s environment was bewildering as well gruesome. The enemies were indistinct, but always suggested something fearsome. It was in the absence of detail that sinister things bred in the player’s mind.

I recall one particular room where I was confronted by a strange scraping sound. By this point in the game, it had been established that any unfamiliar sound could be the harbinger of a quick death, so I obsessively searched the room for this slowly moving source of noise. With much difficulty, I spotted a vaguely translucent purple shape resembling an overgrown foetus, shuffling around a corner of the room. Instantly I attacked it with a kitchen knife. True to its insubstantial appearance, it refused to die, but similarly refused to attack.

Then I realized that I had become so absorbed into the game’s setting that I was literally jumping at shadows (in the game) and to put it simply what the hell was that? The realisation that a game had done this to me was a key part of the horror of that situation.

Ghost writing

The plot of Forbidden Siren attempts to make the player ask even more disturbing questions, but perhaps it takes the player a step too far outside the game. For some, this is simply a matter of taste, but for all the extra material, the multiple timelines that cross one another through the game’s own mythology, the actual experience of gameplay starts to feel detached. For a game as difficult and challenging as Forbidden Siren, this is almost the kiss of death. The mystery intrigues, but the act of walking the characters through tense situations to make the mystery unfold becomes mechanical. Before long, hiding from your enemies becomes a meaningless game of hide and seek in between plot elements.

There is a horror of sorts in here; the frustration of being lost, with only a slim chance of ever finding your way out. But somewhere along the way, Forbidden Siren almost stops being a game. It’s a result that’s hard to criticise because for the most part that seems to be how it was all engineered.

Zombie pacing

You could argue that the slow, deliberate pace of the controls makes for a more contemplative game. You could argue that the necessity to study each map carefully, so as to gain your bearings based on landmarks alone, makes for a more immersive experience. In the light of the game, all these arguments make sense. But none of them make the gameplay any more fun or involving.

Simply put, what the characters in the game experience is horrible, there is little doubt about that. But intrigued as I was by their experience, I had little desire to experience the worst of it. The thrills, yes! The disturbing sights, most definitely! But hours of repetitively stumbling in the dark can sometimes be just that.

To put it politely, in between its gameplay and its plot, Forbidden Siren is sometimes at risk of disappearing into a black lightless void of its own creation.

A light at the end of the tunnel?

But there is still depth in the experience, an effect similar to studying a mythology, slowly piecing together a puzzle to uncover a bigger picture. A problem arises, however, when there are missing pieces in this puzzle. The awful English voice acting is at odds with all of the presentation in the game. With a game that is this much hard work, this is almost unforgivable. The visuals, although variable, often manage an eerie photo-realistic quality. The characters often manage to look like distorted versions of real people (digitised as they are from Japanese actors). Hearing flat, monotone acting simply destroys the experience.

To compound this, there are pages of documents, notes and articles that you will uncover over the course of the game. Given the poor standard of translation in the voice acting, there is more than enough reason to doubt the quality of translation in these materials as well.

Tears of blood

The greatest disappointment in Forbidden Siren is that there will be people who will (voluntarily) delve into it and find an absorbing experience. It’s just a shame that they have to end up being punished by the obstinate gameplay, and so poorly rewarded by the shallow translation. Forbidden Siren’s greatest strength is that it hints at depth, even giving brief unnerving glimpses, but it still fails to express itself well enough for many of us to understand, and for the rest of us to bother.