Title: Siren: Blood Curse
Platforms: PlayStation 3
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: SCE Japan Studio
Rating: M for Mature

In Sire: Blood Curse, a new episodic series developed by Sony Computer Entertainment's Japan Studio, the boogeyman comes to life in the form of an occult-like possession; anyone who is a fan of the "Evil Dead" series should have a pretty good grasp on that subject. While the devil is not directly involved, you get the sense that it's ancient, omnipresent, sinister and could be associated with Satanism in some manner. Siren's overall scene works wonders on paranoia, especially when the lights are low and the house falls silent. Did something move in the kitchen? What was that noise? If anything, the developer did an outstanding job scaring the crap out of the player, and for that, they deserve a standing ovation.

Blood Curse is a sequel to the original Siren for the PlayStation 2, but this time around Sony decided to approach the new title in a much different way: 12 downloadable episodes available on the PlayStation Network. Does Blood Curse earn the "Survival Horror Game of the Year" award? That depends on the competition. On its own, the game features extreme highs and extreme lows. During the highs, you aim to keep moving despite the darkness, despite what moves out in the void, to see what happens next to the band of characters. During the intense lows, you wonder just why you're playing such an awful mess, wonder why the developer couldn't come up with something a bit more streamlined, and not so over-inflated in the gameplay department. This judgment may sound a bit harsh, but the fact is that a good game requires logic and continuity, and without those two in hand, you lose the audience.

Blood Curse definitely kicks off on a creepy, sinister note even before you click on "new game." A blood-red background gently ripples with the impact of unseen drops, but the real demon here is the opening theme, providing a sharp violin set against a demonic chant reminiscent of "Evil Dead" or a Dario Argento flick. Once the actual game begins, you're taken on a semi-"Blair Witch Project" outing, complete with shaky-cam effects, a frightened woman observer about to lose her cool and grainy visuals that basically leaves the actual horror to the imagination. A town has disappeared. Something sinister is going on, something seething with an occult flair and plenty of blood. The opening sequence mercilessly pulls you in and promises to rival other well-known survival horror games.

Siren: Blood Curse follows the Siren storyline and features a familiar, third-person camera view for survival horror fans.

But suddenly the focus immediately shifts away from the apparent ritual and its onlookers, and sets eyes on a young male fleeing the scene, barely escaping the horrors by the skin of his teeth. Thus, this chap becomes the main protagonist - college student Howard Wright - in this opening episode as he attempts to escape from a possessed or seemingly zombified police officer. While the episode itself weighs in at a hefty 1035 MB, the gameplay time is frighteningly short. So how long was the actual length? It can't be more than 20 minutes, if that. It feels way too short, and by the end of the episode, when the supposed cliff-hanger leaves you scratching your head, you'll feel somewhat cheated. After all, it took longer to download and install the episode, and initially, that didn't look like a good sign.

Will the entire game be like this? Actually, no. Many episodes felt just as quick, but others felt relentlessly long. Again, it depends on the situation and the individual character's objectives. Running through dreary fields and breaking magical seals may seem like a walk in the park next to getting your head severed the moment the current chapter loads. As for the actual file sizes, they vary between 510 MB and Episode 12's 1193 MB. Still, in most cases, it seemed to take longer to download and install rather than actually play.

Overall, the total gameplay time registered just over 20 hours, and a good chunk of that were probably replays and general searches. The virtual territory covered in Siren feels enormous, and according to the game's end results, I traveled 127,594 feet from start to finished. The final results also offer other cool statistics like enemies defeated, times discovered (you have to remain in stealth mode in many stages), the number of times your character is killed, the number of times he/she was knocked down and so forth. The game also offers rewards for Stealth, No Sight Jacking, No Damage and No Kills; however Siren does not offer PSN Trophies at the time of this writing. That was a letdown actually, as both the game and the Trophy feature debuted on the PlayStation 3 around the same timeframe.

Despite that small setback, Siren allows gamers to take control of seven different characters: Sol Jackson, Howard Wright, Melissa Gale, Sam Monroe, Seigo Saiga, Amana and little Bella Monroe. From a controller standpoint, Siren is a mixed bag, pitting the camera just over the shoulder in a third-person view. With the left thumbstick, you can move the character in any direction, however there is no strafing abilities, and the right thumbstick only offers a limited camera tilt, moving slightly from left to right and up and down. The options menu allows the player to fix the camera behind the character (Type B), and you can even shift into first-person mode in-game, however the latter doesn't feature your typical FPS setup and actually plays worse than the third-person perspective. Either way, the limitation provided by the camera only increases the tension throughout the game anyway, especially when things attack from outside your field-of-view.

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