I was meant to play this game and I was forged in the fire of it.

Okay, that sounds insane so let me explain what I mean. In an issue of Game Informer that came out sometime during the 00s, there was an ad for a game.
I remember the ad very well. The game it described was fascinating. A tense survival horror game, a genre I'd never played. One where you were alone in a run-down village. But what interested me the most was that its story was told out of order, the levels taking place at different times, and you'd have to piece everything together yourself if you wanted to understand the full story.

I remembered that this game was called SIREN, and I never forgot that. Thinking back on it, the ad was likely for Siren: Blood Curse, the remake/remix of this game for PS3, but what cemented itself in my mind was the PS2 game. There was no point in time where I ever wondered "What was that game I saw the ad for?" ; I never forgot. Every once in awhile, I would think about Siren, and wonder if one day I'd ever be able to play it. I never looked it up, never watched any videos of it. I just kept it in my head, a gaming white whale, like Asura's Wrath is for me still.

But in December 2016, I was able to buy the game. I had no idea it was even on PS4, upscaled with trophy support. It was like a miracle, like they'd put it there just for me. Maybe it wasn't important, but it felt important. And I resolved that I wouldn't just play the game, but I would stream it, every time I played it. This isn't something I often do, there's only a handful of games I've streamed all of and most are shorter than Siren.

What I quickly discovered was that Siren is not an easy game to play. Its controls are only slightly better than tank controls, the levels don't give you much direction, sight-jacking often requires a lot of waiting around for enemies to move where you want them to, and dying could often set you back pretty far. For someone like me who usually tries to play games without looking anything up, it was a real challenge. Even learning that the manual had tips for every mission only helped a little bit. Eventually I did have to look two or three things up online. It took me a year and five months, but I eventually beat Siren, getting the full ending, doing everything but getting all the archive items.

It was tough. At times I disliked the game. There were streams where I'd only manage to do one level, parts of the game that I absolutely dreaded getting to. But even so I saw how special it was. Especially these years later, the bad memories fade away and I mostly remember the parts I loved.

And those parts are fantastic. The atmosphere and area design is second-to-none, I feel like there are probably Japanese villages that look exactly like this. The village has 9 areas and you can see exactly where they are in relation to each other. After awhile, a couple of those areas transform as the monsters build new structures over them. I can still describe every single area.

The sound-design creates ever-present tension. The monsters are awful and memorable. The archive isn't just data files or audio logs, they're random bits and bobs that you find around town, sometimes offering insights, sometimes just adding color to the world. The main characters are rendered in this way where real photos of facial expressions are recreated in polygons and animated - it actually works really well, even with the british accents they give everyone in the dub. Each of them is distinct and once again I could easily describe every one, even if I couldn't remember all their names.

For every way the gameplay is frustrating, Siren is a master-craft in another. Even its story, its out-of-order, incredibly confusing story, still feels cool and epic even if you only get the broad strokes. I came out of it being thankful for having played it.

There's one level in the game specifically that bowled me over. In it you play as a pre-teen girl looking for her parents. You go through the farmland/dried-up river area, and it looks different from when you've seen it before. The air is full of bright lights like fireflies. There's weird noises all around. It's almost beautiful. But the enemies are still there and you still have to avoid them like usual. So you sneak through, coming close to being detected once or twice but - phew - they don't notice you. You wouldn't have any way to defend yourself if they did. Finally the girl reaches the church where her parents are. The door is locked. She goes to the window and knocks on it, yelling for her mom and dad. In the church her parents shriek and move away from the window. Then you see - the girl has become a monster herself, the zombie-like shibito that wander the village. First I realized, oh, that's why the level looked weird, because that's how shibito see the world. And it gives you insight into some of their actions later in the game. But then I realized something else, and thought "Hold on a minute...If this girl is a shibito...And the monsters in the level are shibito...Were they even looking for me? Would they even have hurt me if they caught me?"

I later tested this and found that, no, they wouldn't. They completely ignore you, you're just another shibito like them. Throughout that level, the fear is entirely in your head, and even if you get within a distance where they'd normally notice you but they don't, you probably don't even realize it, you just think "oh, that was a close one, they almost saw me." I don't know how this level plays out for everyone but I imagine that figuring out that the enemies are harmless during the level itself is a rare occurrence, because it goes against everything you've done up to that point. It's incredible.

One day, a youtuber will discover this and put it in a video essay and Siren will begin to get the respect it deserves. For now, it'll continue to be played by horror game fans and Silent Hill lovers - neither of which I am - and influence Japanese horror games, including, seemingly, director Keiichiro Toyama's next game, Slitterhead, which also features a realistic Japanese setting - urban this time - and has creatures that look like shibito on steroids.

I don't have a great way to end this review, but if this sounds like an experience you'd get something out of, it's on the PS Store; try throwing yourself into that fire.

The worst of the Silver Case trilogy, it's strong in several places, but gets far too confusing in its main storyline (I believe a lot of the later stuff in this storyline was written for this version as the original mobile game wasn't finished). The other two storylines are quite good but it still doesn't compare to the original and Flower Sun Rain. I should mention that the extra chapter in this, YUKI, is one of the best things across all three games though. There's still nothing like this trilogy and if you liked the others you'll like this one too.

A game that is largely memorable to me for its comparability to The Last Guardian, which took about as long to develop and came out as about the same time with about the same expectations placed on it by fans. While TLG still, in my opinion, ended up being the game it was intended to be from the start of development, and further, a success when it came to my own expectations for it, FFXV did not do either of those things.

I won't write a whole dissertation on it but whenever I mention FFXV these days it's usually in that context. Some things I really liked about this game was the way they did attempt to add to it and fix it after its release( which made it way better though I was not able to play all of that content), the graphics, and how it felt to drive around with the guys. The story does feel undercooked and the game generally needed more dev time. Work on your game until it's done, devs. Work on it until it's done.

A ton of replayability, I was in the mood for a rhythm game when this came out and I was playing it daily for a good while.

The small amount of story in this game shifted me from being wary of what Tetsuya Nomura is planning on doing with the character of Yozora and the world he comes from, to having total faith in where the series is going.

Believe it or not, with this game and the ending of the mobile game which was actually somehow good, the story of Kingdom Hearts is the most engaging it's ever been.