The ruthless PS2 cult classic
Forbidden Siren, seeing through the eyes of those who hunt you
- Player rating
- 4.4/5
- Main story
- 19.6 h
- Genre
- Horror
Designed by Keiichiro Toyama, creator of the first Silent Hill, Forbidden Siren is one of the most singular horror games on PS2. And one of the hardest. It is in the Classics Catalog.
Hanuda is an isolated Japanese mountain village. One night a siren sounds, the surrounding sea turns red and the villagers become shibito, beings neither dead nor alive who carry on with their routines — and kill anyone who is not like them. The game follows around ten survivors over the three days that follow.
Its core mechanic is called sightjacking: by concentrating, a character tunes in to what nearby shibito can see. You watch their patrols, check through their eyes where they are looking, then slip past. It is a powerful idea, because it makes the enemy your main source of information, and therefore of tension.
The story is fragmented. A grid links characters and hours; finishing a scenario with a secondary objective unlocks another one elsewhere in the timeline. You often have to return to a scene you already played to do something different, and piece together the village's story yourself.
To be blunt: this is a demanding game, sometimes an opaque one. Many characters are unarmed, secondary objectives are rarely spelled out, and failure sends you back to the start of the scenario. The characters' faces, photographed from real actors, give it a strangeness that time has not erased.
Few games have aged so well in their strangeness, and few were played so little in Europe. Allow around twenty hours, and keep a walkthrough at hand without shame. Toyama went on to make Gravity Rush, then Slitterhead in 2024.