Forbidden Siren

A survival horror game with a few cool features takes on the big boys of the genre.

For millennia Capcom’s Resident Evil and Konami’s Silent Hill have had a stranglehold on the survival horror genre and recent attempts by others, like Cold Fear and Haunting Ground, have met only limited success despite their fresh approaches. Forbidden Siren 2 (known as just Siren 2 overseas) is Sony’s attempt to slither into the hearts of RE and SH fans and lay a few eggs of defection.

The original Siren was based in the restrictive locale of a small village, so it’s unsurprising that the sequel’s first point of action was to let a larger space – an island in fact. Called Yami-jima, the landmass is home to various nasties including hungry zombie folk and extremely violent ghosts.

The story is greatly obfuscated and much of the game as expected is spent uncovering all the bits and pieces. What we can say is that the game follows a number of different characters that have become stranded on the island and plays out their experiences. These characters include Mamoru Itsuki, the editor of a Fortean Times-like magazine; Shu Mikami, a man with poor vision and a seeing-eye dog and Shigeru Fujita, a troubled police officer.

FS2’s big feature is ‘Sightjacking’. Using the second left shoulder button you can switch to a screen of static and, using the left analog stick ‘tune-in’ to the viewpoints of NPCs and enemies in the vicinity. Once a viewpoint is found, it can be bound to one of the four main buttons for recall later. Aside from the obvious strategic advantages, Sightjacking can reveal combinations to locks and other nifty things. The feature is very well done, if a little daunting, and often plays a pivotal role in gameplay.

The grainy and macabre graphics give Forbidden Siren 2 a very Silent Hill feel and indeed, the game plays in a similar fashion. Fixed camera points are discarded, however, and like a third-person shooter the player gets to follow just above and behind the protagonist. Despite this, combat is still troublesome and much of the time it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on. This is particularly painful when playing Shu, as you spend most of your time smashing into walls via his Sightjacked seeing-eye dog.

The game is divided into timeslots and you only get to play each character for around 10-15 minutes per slot. While this sounds great in theory, the lack of a continuous viewpoint means the story comes out disjointed. Characters also seem to lose their weapons between levels, throwing any sort of consistency out the window. Playing two or three characters would have been fine, but the sixteen in the game is just too much to handle.

Forbidden Siren 2 is a formidable effort at cracking into the survival horror genre. But the piece-meal design, short levels and disjointed nature of the title make it hard to get into.