SIREN: Blood Curse

Is this Sony Japan's first true hit for the PS3? We review the full Blu-ray release of the game.

	Version PlayStation 3	Developer Sony Japan	Publisher SCE	Genre Horror

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In any case, if Sony Japan goes out of its way to keep you from going out of yours, it also blocks said way with some of the most unnerving, vengeful, downright nasty enemies to grace a PlayStation disc drive. In screenshots the Shibito look impressive but generic - just your everyday roster of ghoulish nurses, policemen and labourers, terrifyingly detailed but nothing you haven't hammered to gorey mush in the past. See them in motion, however, and the picture gets vastly more hideous. The Shibito aren't mindlessly hostile automatons like Resident Evil's zombie-villagers, or conceptual beasties like the denizens of Silent Hill: they remember what it was like to be alive and carry out grotesque, motion-captured parodies of old habits. You'll come across Shibito basking in filthy bath water, or at a desk milling the air with a long-exhausted pen, or taking endless repeat rides in elevators. Regrettably, the monster designs teeter into B-movie territory towards the mid-part of the game, but the quality level doesn't skip a beat throughout.

You can three-hit mash the Shibito to death easily enough, providing you've stumbled upon a decent weapon - firearms are few and far between - but they'll reanimate after a while, often catching you unawares later on in the level. Discretion is most definitely the better part of valour here, and fortunately discretion has an aid in the form of "sight-jacking," a contrived but clever telepathic ability which lets you see through the eyes of friends and enemies. Holding L2 splits the screen in two and brings up a ghostly targeting reticule, movable with the right stick; once you've found another being - signposted by a glowing crosshair - and hit square to lock on, the right half of the screen shows you their perspective, while letting you move and interact as normal on the left. Blood Curse seldom forces you to make use of this ability, but it's still an invaluable means of examining the Shibito from a safe vantage point, identifying their weapons and nearby points of interest, working out their movement patterns and getting past them undetected. Sight-jacking also contributes, rather horribly, to the immersion factor, letting you hear each inhuman cackle or breathy whisper as though it issued from your own lips.

Shame then that Sony Japan felt obliged to plaster the process with so many otherworldly filters, which not only put the frame rate through the bedrock but also render the environments occasionally indecipherable. Hanuda is quite dark and cluttered enough, thanks very much; having to traverse it while in the grip of lag-strewn weird-o-vision simply makes what should be a highlight feel like a chore.

This and a few other mechanical niggles stop Blood Curse marginally short of excellence. Neither of the two fully manual third person camera angles is very inspiring: you'll find it hard to pinpoint objects below waist-height at close quarters, which leads to much angling blindly to and fro. Friendly NPC behaviour leaves something to be desired, too: pathfinding is never an issue, but your companions have a habit of charging off Light-Brigade-style or getting in the way of your blows.

These hiccups aside, Siren: Blood Curse is a dish, and the Blu-ray release will come as a welcome prospect to those intimidated by the PSN version's 10GB download size. There's no cynical retail release price inflation here, either: 20 pounds nets you 20 hours plus of trouser-soiling chills, with a "making of..." documentary thrown in for good measure. Given Alone in the Dark's tantalisingly mixed success, it's great to see a survival horror franchise put the episodic format to sterling use. It might be the same old Siren at heart, schoolgirls and all, but genre fans would be foolish to leave this body rotting in the ditch.

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