On October 15, PlayStation Plus Game Catalog – available to all PS Plus Extra and Premium members – will add ten new titles to its library, including Dambuster Studios’ zombie-slaying action RPG Dead Island 2, Terrible Toybox’s acclaimed point-and-click throwback Return to Monkey Island, Supermassive’s interactive horror adventure The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me, Two Point Studios’ sophomore business simulation outing Two Point Campus, Nomada Studio’s narrative platforming adventure Gris, and IllFonic’s asymmetrical multiplayer title Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, among others.

On the same day, those subscribed to PlayStation Plus Premium will also get access to a couple of survival horror classics in Capcom’s Dino Crisis and PlayStation’s own Siren, while PlayStation VR2’s The Last Clockwinder will also become playable for subscribers.

You can view the full list of games being added to both libraries below.

PLAYSTATION PLUS GAME CATALOG

• Dead Island 2 (PS5, PS4)
• Two Point Campus (PS5, PS4)
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me (PS5, PS4)
• Gris (PS5, PS4)
• Return to Monkey Island (PS5)
• Ghostbursters: Spirits Unleashed (PS5, PS4)
• Firefighting Simulator The Squad (PS5, PS4)
• Overpass 2 (PS5)
• Tour de France 2023 (PS5, PS4)
• Ghost Recon Wildlands (PS4)

PLAYSTATION PLUS PREMIUM

• The Last Clockwinder (PS VR2)
• Dino Crisis (PS5, PS4)
• Siren (PS5, PS4)
• R-Type Dimensions EX (PS4)

Scarlet Hollow

For all intents and purposes, Scarlet Hollow is a visual novel with extensive dialogue choices, traits and a relationship system, where it’s possible to become friend or foe with different characters, further influencing one’s own story. Backed by some great art and aesthetics, there’s a genuinely disturbing tale underneath with events changing based on your choices. What dark mystery awaits in this quiet mining town? It’s up to you to find out.

Song of Horror

What if you faced a terrifying being that could also learn from your actions and plan accordingly? That’s The Presence, the antagonistic force of Song of Horror. The title features a number of characters, each exploring the house of Sebastian P. Husher and facing off against the terrifying Presence. When one character dies, the next continues the story, investigating in their own way. However, The Presence will learn from each incursion and hunt you down.

There were lots of great second-tier horror games out there like Fatal Frame, Haunting Ground, Cold Fear, and others that were great in their own right. Among the horror games that almost made it was the Siren series, which would end up creating a nice underground following of fans despite not getting a whole lot of support from reviewers or major marketing teams. Ultimately three main games would be released in the series within a decade, followed by a slow and quiet fizzling out that would leave the franchise with a reasonably large fan-base that still exists to this day but for some reason not enough juice behind it to justify a new game. But why is that? With survival horror being one of the most closely held genres in gaming now-a-days, why haven’t we seen another Siren game in so long? What the hell happened to Siren?

As we went over in our discussion about what happened to Silent Hill, one of the major blunders Konami made during their restructuring in the mid-2000’s was the disbandment of Team Silent, the team of misfit developers that poured all of their talents into the cauldron and ended up coming up with the ultra successful Silent Hill franchise. Konami wanted western developers to work on the franchise and decided to re-assign members of Team Silent to other projects. Some went with Kojima to work on Metal Gear games, and some of them ended up leaving Konami altogether to work with Sony Interactive and Japan Studio to form Project Siren, which would, as you may have guessed, go on to make Siren or Forbidden Siren as it was known outside of North America.

Despite the fact that “Team Silent” and “Project Siren” seem to communicate completely different philosophies about volume, the concept of Siren ended up having a lot in common with Silent Hill. Both games took place in far away, remote locations that seemed to have a mind of their own, both involved dark cult-heavy story lines, and both have lots of disturbing imagery and psychological horror elements and other touchy concepts that most survival horror games didn’t have the guts to explore. However Siren did set itself apart from it’s predecessor by implementing a much more stealth-focused approach to game play.

Yes, you could fight your way out of most situations Harry Mason style, but sneaking by the enemies or “shibido” which roughly translates to “corpse people”, was what the game mostly wanted you to do. And using a mechanic called sight-jacking that let you see through the monsters’ eyes at certain junctions gave you an edge to figure out when and where to move in a way that didn’t always work perfectly, but it definitely brought a new sense of strategy and urgency into the genre.

Couple those mechanics with Silent Hill-inspired presentation and some striking face mapping techniques and what you ended up with was a very unique flavor of horror that showed off the team’s experience and willingness to take their disturbing vision to another level. With all of those interesting ingredients, you’d think Siren would be a hit right? Well, not really. Reception of the original game was lukewarm at best and many major reviewers criticized its dated controls and tedious combat. With all of the things Siren had gotten right, it wasn’t going to get the free pass on having stiff combat and controls that Silent Hill was afforded, and the game’s overall reception suffered greatly because of its lack of evolution in that department.

Forbidden Siren 2 did improve on most of the elements of the first game. Movement was snappier and combat was less stifled, while the overall mood of the original was largely preserved with a new cast of characters and a story that played out in a similar fashion to the first game. Sadly, the second game in the series didn’t get an official release in North America, which is never a good sign for any franchise that is just putting out its second game. No franchise wants to miss out on the North American territory, but perhaps the decision was made to keep it out of the states due to the average to below average reviews and maybe Project Siren decided that the slower game play style and somewhat confusing storytelling style wasn’t a good fit for North American audiences. Regardless of why, this was arguably the beginning of the end for the Siren series.

Instead of coming back out swinging with a great sequel worldwide, Siren, as a series was quarantining itself off from those who did enjoy it in the states, making itself even more of a niche experience than it already was. Thankfully, in a few years and on a new generation of hardware, Siren Blood Curse would be released worldwide, albeit digitally and episodically. This was more of a reboot of the original than a third entry in the series though, and retold the story of the cursed Japanese village and some unsuspecting travelers stumbling on a disturbing cult ritual. Technically speaking the game was  a huge step up and looked pretty nice for 2008.

The characters, writing, and game play were definitely more tailored for western audiences, and it was a valiant attempt to morph what the original idea of the game was ever so slightly into something that Western audiences could more easily digest. I think it turned out really nicely despite some of the genuine weirdness being sacrificed, but sadly, Blood Curse stayed pretty niche and underground at a time when the series really needed a hit, and this was more than likely the last straw for Project Siren.

If your series hasn’t caught on after three games and nearly ten years, its understandable that you might want to try something new. So Team Siren completely shifted their focus away from that series and started work on the excellent Gravity Rush for the Playstation Vita, and then Gravity Rush 2, neither of which totally blew up either, but they certainly performed much better than the Siren series in terms of critical and commercial success, so in that sense it was probably a good move for the studio.

Unlike most of these “what the hell happened” conversations we have here at gaming bolt, when it comes to Siren’s future I’m not very hopeful. This development team is still small and has been given every reason to ditch Siren while also being given every incentive to move on to other ideas, as Gravity Rush definitely proved that they are more than capable of making unique games that review and sell well. So I suspect we’re going to see them go in that direction for the foreseeable future.

As much as us horror enthusiasts would love to see another Siren, I just don’t see it making any sense for the time being. Surely that idea must be still bouncing around in halls of Japan Studio to some degree though, so if the team that worked on Siren continues to see success in other areas and gets to the point where they can justify creative risks again, who knows. Just don’t hold your breath for now.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

The uncanny valley, for the unfamiliar, is that weird feeling you get when you look at something that almost looks like a person, but it isn’t quite right and inspires repulsion as a result. You may have felt it looking at screenshots of Detroit: Become Human. While with current hardware, it’s nearly impossible to cross that gap while maintaining a playable state, Epic Games CTO believes that we will soon be able to overcome this limitation.

Speaking with Gamesbeat, Kim Libreri discussed the hurdles that come with the uncanny valley in a rather frank manner, saying that while current GPUs within systems just can’t do everything to the right level, next generation will have no problems. “It’s going to end up being not about your technical expertise to make these things,” he said. “That technique will become ubiquitous over time. It’s got to be about telling an awesome story where people will want to watch that face get involved and do interesting things.”

The subject came about due to a question regarding the impressive Siren demo that Epic shared with attendants of the Game Developers Conference 2018. The new Siren technology that is now shipping with Unreal Engine 4.20 includes new skin shaders and facial animation techniques to bring up the quality of models in games using Unreal Engine. The new update to the Unreal Engine also means great things for weaker hardware such as Nintendo Switch.

According to Sony, their inclusion of Siren on the PlayStation 4 launch title list was a mistake. Siren, as many gamers know, was a horror survival video game released for the PlayStation 2 in 2003. This listing gave fans hope that there may be a sequel in the works from developers Project Siren and Sony.

However, Sony debunked this rumor, with news that Siren was actually the working title for an entirely different game set to be released with the launch of the PlayStation 4, Rime.

“The listing for Siren was a mistake, it should have listed Rime. Siren was the working title name for Rime prior to its announcement at Gamescom 2013,” a Sony representative clarified.

There have been two sequels for Siren thus far, one in 2006, Forbidden Siren 2, and one in 2008 for PS3, Siren: Blood Curse. As of now there are no new Siren titles that have been announced, so fans of the series will have to continue to wait.

Source: IGN

Siren, the PlayStation exclusive horror series from Japan Studio, may be seeing a well anticipated return on the PlayStation 4 soon, if this press release from PlayStation Romania is to be believed. To quote it verbatim:

‘Furthermore, Sony Computer Entertainment studios around the world are working to develop more than 30 titles such as inFAMOUS: Second Son,The Order: 1886, Siren, Helldivers, Shadow of the Beast, and Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture. Of these, 20 games will be available in the first year since its launch, and 12 are not part of existing series.’

It is to be noted that all of those other titles have been confirmed already, so Siren’s inclusion there might be an inadvertent slip up that outs the existence of the game before its intended announcement.

The last entry in the series was Siren: Blood Curse for the PlayStation 3. The series, while never selling much, has garnered a lot of critical acclaim, so it will be interesting to see its eventual return.

[Gematsu]