Ever since I played Silent Hill many years back, I've become a fan of its creator and director Keiichiro Toyama. No matter what game he is directing, be it a disturbing psychological horror game or a stylish action-adventure sandbox like Gravity Rush, his games have an awfully specific perspective that just continuously draws me to him. These projects excel at presenting gameplay mechanics that are inventive, deeply immersive worlds, and storylines that are intricate with detail that makes you want to learn more about everything.
Yet, for the longest time, I hadn’t played Toyama’s other horror project besides Silent Hill. This game, Siren, was one of his first ventures after leaving Konami and partnering with Sony Computer Entertainment. Curiously enough, this project shares many similarities with his previous game and in many ways could even be considered a re-contextualized and re-imagined take on that same idea. Yet, even with all these parallels and similarities, Siren is one of the most unique horror games I’ve played, both for better and for worse.
Its almost strange that, despite being native to Japan, Toyama dedicated his career up to that point towards making games set in a western setting and inspired by western media. For this reason, he and his team moved forward in creating a game that draws inspiration from Japan first and foremost. The result is what I like to call a “Made in Japan” Silent Hill, where the approach to horror and storytelling is the same and the premise shares many parallels, but the aesthetic and cultural context is shifted to reflect another point of view.
The Silent Hill parallels aren’t unwarranted either. Besides Keiichiro Toyama, other Team Silent members would gradually join the team such as Isao Takahashi, background designer of Silent Hill that became the art director of Siren; and Naoko Sato, who was a monster designer for Silent Hill and moved on to fill the important shoes of Scenario Writer for Siren.
With their experience creating Silent Hill, project SIREN was more knowledgeable than ever on how to nail this type of horror and take further steps to advance the formula that started all the way back with their first game. Although Siren has a different flavor and takes place in a different context, a lot of the same design decisions from Silent Hill are retained to create a successor that is in many ways more faithful than Team Silent’s own canonically sanctioned sequel.
Yet, even with all these refinements and ambition to create a bigger and more unique game out of the survival horror template, I wouldn’t praise Siren as much as I would Silent Hill. I think this is the case because Siren feels at times like its escalating both the best and worst aspects of Silent Hill. So while you get more of the same detailed storytelling and disturbing aesthetics, you also get the confusion, clumsiness and obscurity of that first game taken to a degree where it ceases to be elegant and becomes frustrating.
I won’t beat around the bush; Siren is not a game I love. In fact, Siren is hardly a game I like, but its also a game that I respect. There are so many aspects to Siren that I love like its complex and ambitious storyline or its wonderfully immersive and depraved atmosphere. Yet, when it comes to the game’s design and the way it presents those elements I like, it crosses the line of what I consider an acceptable disrespect to my patience. Siren is a game that needs a LOT of patience to finish, and even more patience to figure out completely. While I’m not against a game that asks the player to put in the effort to understand it, Siren has such an abundance of time wasting and frustrating elements that its questionable whether or not it was all worth it in the end.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s much I want to talk about with Siren and there’s no better place to start than with its presentation. When it comes to presenting situations that create a sensation of sheer horror, Siren is just as good as its predecessor, if not better. Employing many of the same tricks as Silent Hill, this game puts the player in an unfavorable, claustrophobic and deeply twisted circumstance that never ceases to create an understated, but palpable feeling of dread with the player.
One very important aspect of presenting convincing horror in a videogame is creating a good setting for the player to immerse themselves in, and Siren is sublime in the way that it uses art and sound to immerse the player in the town of Hanuda. From the beginning, the goal was to create a rural Japanese town that left them feeling stranded and isolated, without losing that authentic Japanese familiarity. Through great attention to detail with the look and feel of each area, Siren succeeds with flying colors.
The town of Hanuda feels like a sickly, damp and unfathomable town to be in. Rust and degradation seeps through every crack in the woods, while the constant rain combined with the dense fog creates an exasperating atmosphere that the player does not want to be involved with. The game forces you to face unpleasant and otherworldly locations that are dark and dilapidated, further immersing you in the horror and dread that our main characters are experiencing at that moment, even when far removed from the threat of enemies that stalk you in the dark.
During development, project SIREN researched abandoned towns around Japan and gathered key intel that helped them settle this layer of authenticity that makes the setting feel so authentic and lived in. The creepy isolation of these Japanese towns inspired the many details that helped the team with the creation of Hanuda’s different sections, all while adding their own artistic touches here and there to make the setting more horrifying to play around in.
However, Siren is not entirely content with just depicting this setting as realistically as possible. When the situation calls for it, the artistry of the team really stretches its limits and twists this place into a beautiful, otherworldly nightmare that is nothing like the reality we are so accustomed to living in.
Deep reds fill the scenery to create an oppressive feeling that’s beautifully contrasted with heavenly rays of light. You also see complex amalgamations of corrupted scenery that challenge our comprehension of the town’s architecture, as well as our own interpretation of what's possible in reality.
Monster design is also quite good, though it doesn’t start out that way. Initially, the design of the Shibito is simple and straightforward, showing twisted human faces with eerie smiles. Yet, as the game goes on, their grotesque proportions and features become more intense as they begin to resemble creatures other than human. Their contorted movements, bloated faces and bug-like features bring body horror to the extreme and successfully make the player fear them on a psychological level.
Their dialogue only intensifies the fear the player feels towards them by making distorted attempts at conversation interrupted by unusual wails or insane mumblings. Throughout the game, the fear of losing and the dread of silence is only intensified when the player hears the Shibito in the far distance or in their close proximity. These twisted murmurs are what make these enemies scary and threatening.
Perhaps the best part of Siren is its wonderful sound design that perfectly complements the visuals in creating an otherworldly atmosphere. What’s important here is the fact that silence isn’t a constant in the game, its only used as texture to complement and juxtapose the other twisted sounds the player will be hearing on an occasional basis like the muttering of Shibitos, the chittering of dangerous monsters, the downpour of rain, and the overpowering presence of the game’s soundtrack. Thanks to its sound design, the town of Hanuda feels like a lonely, dangerous and scary place to be in.
The most important ingredient in the soundscape of the game is the oppressive and chilling sound of air raid sirens that prevails across the town, giving it a dangerous and oppressive feel. Its occasional loud blaring will startle the player and give them a chilling warning of dangers to come or immerse them into a world that’s no longer in the realm of reality.
Siren’s Original Soundtrack is highly effective at setting up this atmosphere. It instills fear in the player by incorporating disparate elements, compositions and instruments while making them work together to create a culturally rich listening experience that creates a wonderful sense of unease. The music carefully straddles the line between being unpleasant and offering a strong and immersive atmosphere that sucks you right in with unusual bell chimes and disembodied singing.
There is a decent variation to the soundtrack as well. Songs can be slow, quiet and atmospheric, while others are ominous and foreboding. I particularly like how it employs blaring deep throat singing in its vocals to make the player feel uncomfortable in many situations. Yet, at times, this variation tends to lean towards feeling more out of place, such as the hard rock ending theme. Ultimately, there’s a nice split between songs that are adequately memorable and disquieting and songs that don’t contribute much to the overall score.
One of Siren’s biggest inspirations is the Blair Witch project. This inspiration is particularly prevalent through the game’s visual presentation, which has a peculiar faux “found footage” style that gives it its own charm. When you start the game, the game’s intro gives you the impression of booting up a VHS tape and the game’s menus look like you’re playing with a TV menu. This kind of presentation is nothing new, but it does feel fitting for the game since it makes the player feel like they’re piecing together the tapes of a long forgotten urban mystery.
This urban mystery feel is at the core of Siren’s culturally driven psychological horror. While the game’s perturbing presentation is rooted in the primordial fears of the human mind like the fear of the unknown, repulsion towards insects or apprehension to darkness and claustrophobia, there is also a cultural layer to the horror that makes Siren interesting. From an international standpoint, the horror of Siren works because its exotic and foreign, removing the player from any sense of familiarity. Yet, from a local point of view, Siren also works because its drawing from the common knowledge and culture from Japan to twist the ordinary and rural into something disturbing and unfamiliar.
No matter where you’re from or from what angle you view Siren from, you will feel a constant unease and desperate loneliness while playing the game. By blurring the lines between what’s real and familiar with the otherworldliness of a hellish nightmare, Siren removes all sense of comfort from the player and puts them in a dreadful and unfamiliar circumstance that’s wonderfully presented through art and sound. It is the kind of atmosphere that is joyful to play through and keeps you on your toes as you try your best to play through the game.
Siren’s gameplay mechanics work wonderfully to compliment that feeling of unease and instill fear and anxiousness into the player thanks to the signature Sightjack mechanic. This mechanic allows the player to see through the eyes of enemy Shibitos and other living beings, at the expense of leaving the protagonist vulnerable to new attacks. This is a great mechanical advantage that’s well balanced to keep the player on edge about enemy stalkers while also making them aware of opportunities to sneak by.
This unique game of cat and mouse is very tense and novel for a survival horror game. It strikes that balance of giving the player a way to succeed while also increasing tension during gameplay. You can see what everyone else is doing, but you cannot see yourself when you’re in danger. At the same time, you can see other points of view, but you can never lose that sense of misdirection and claustrophobia that comes from peering through a random body’s eyes.
Moreover, there’s a wonderful attention to detail when it comes to the enemy AI patterns which makes them feel alive in a rather threatening way. When peering through their eyes, you’ll notice that each one of them follows set routines that tell their own story through their actions. By learning about their routines, you can also learn about what kind of people they used to be before they turned into monsters, and once they snap from their calm habits and turn towards attacking you, the game becomes increasingly stressful.
Using subtle cues for storytelling is the key aspect that makes Siren stand out as a narrative. Its story revolves around the blurring of culture and reality, as you see folklore tales becomes true in twisted and surreal ways. Throughout the game, you see and hear of folklore tales and mysteries that affect and parallel the events of the story in strange and mysterious ways. This approach to storytelling is incredibly remarkable and not something I’ve seen done in a horror game, at least with the same level of detail and obscurity that Siren utilizes.
Obscurity and uniqueness can be a good thing for Siren’s storyline, as its often employed to put creative twists on the horror formula. Once again showing off its Blair Witch Project inspirations, several story archives in Siren make direct references to online websites the player can access to gain additional information about the game’s plot. These wonderfully weird Alternate Reality Games add extra pieces to the story in ways that I’ve never seen any other game utilize, and the fact that they’re still accessible today makes the team’s commitment to detail all the more admirable.
Siren’s storyline appeals to a rather specific kind of person; the kind that loves to solve mysteries. Those who enjoy reading between the lines will find Siren’s story to be wonderfully crafted, with plenty of mysteries to solve and unique subplots to discover. Throughout the game, you’re introduced to this complex situation and given tiny bits and pieces of the story that add questions or answer them in subtle was and its up to you to put the pieces together and solve it yourself. By far, the best and most satisfying moment in the game is to finally have all the pieces of the puzzle and crack the mystery once the game is over and all relevant pieces of information have been delivered.
It is only fortunate then that Siren makes it really easy for the player to go back and revisit a lot of that information that they’ve collected. Sure, this information can be harshly difficult to come across and the player might not even know of their existence, but once this information is obtained the player can easily review it in the game’s archives menu. Moreover, the player can re-watch any given cutscene at any moment from Siren’s level select menu, which makes keeping track of all these disparate plot threads a little easier than it was on Silent Hill.
Moreover, it is incredibly important for Siren to aid the player in keeping track of all this information since Siren is a story with a massive breadth of information. This is a narrative with a great sense of scale, all without losing the very personal and limited stakes of the narrative. Siren’s storyline can often masterfully tangle together the narrative arcs of a great number of characters, an even greater canon of mythology and an astronomically large timeline that dates back thousands of years.
Another fascinating aspect of Siren’s timeline is how events across different time periods seem to overlap, creating the feeling of a looping and self-referential series of events. This is not a result of recycled writing however, as these narrative counterparts are an intentional element of the story. Once the player spots these parallels, the feeling of being in another world and the blurring of mythology and reality intensifies greatly now that the game’s history is revealed to be nothing more than an eternal and inescapable punishment.
Siren is a game thick and dripping with all kinds of symbolism. By reading through the game’s memos and looking at all the different artistic inspirations, visual motifs and musical choices, one can gain further understanding of the game’s story and lore by relating these to the game’s events and characters. The game’s lore and its real-world inspirations both work together to tell a mythical story and a cautionary tale about the consequences of craving for the forbidden: that which cannot ever be obtained.
Aside from all its symbolic elements however, Siren is just a plain old good story with solid character drama. It tells a multitude of unique stories with great characterization, ushering in a large cast where almost everyone feels unique and has their own charm and fleshed out motivation. Its easy to find yourself relating to the more hapless of the game’s survivors, cheering for its bravest heroes, or wishing for the downfall of its heinous villains. There is a wide range of character stories that you can experience in the game without ever having to understand what’s even going on in the game’s lore, and that’s good enough to keep you going.
So, we’ve established that Siren excels in many regards and I’ve proven that the game quite fits my tastes… But why is it my least favorite Keiichiro Toyama game? Despite finding so much of it interesting, why can’t I earnestly recommend it to anyone, not even ardent fanatics of the horror genre? That’s because my praise of this game comes mostly from its aftertaste, since the process and experience of playing the game is what left the most horrendously bitter and sour taste in my mouth. It’s a taste so scathing that it almost made me want to write off the whole thing entirely.
I mentioned earlier on in this review that Siren carries over both the best and worst aspects of Silent Hill, while simultaneously doubling down on them. What this means is that its narrative is twice as engaging as that game and the atmosphere is doubly complex and frightening. However, it also means that Siren not only replicates, but further complicates the original game’s obscurity and tedious collection of information. While these issues were tame enough in Silent Hill to not ruin the whole experience, in Siren, they are the unfathomable root of this game’s entire irksome experience as a result of their painful obscurity.
But where do I start? There’s so much in this game going against the player at any given moment that it would be just as difficult to list everything I dislike when compared to everything I genuinely enjoyed. The easiest thing to start with then are the game’s controls, which are quite painful to get used to. Siren works with the usual tank controls that most survival games of this era work with, only changing the movement style when locking onto an enemy to engage in combat.
While everyone likes to rag on the tank controls that games like Silent Hill or Resident Evil used, those are actually quite easy to get used to compared to Siren’s implementation of tank controls. What helps the controls in the aforementioned games is how well integrated they are to those games’ cameras, which are static and give the controls a solid grounding and perspective that allows you to get quickly used to them. Since Siren’s camera is constantly stuck to the player’s back, it makes the controls far more disorienting than they should be.
This is difficult to explain without experiencing it on your own, but one good example is comparing the quick turning in Silent Hill compared to Siren. In both games, quickly turning around is a vital strategy that is necessary to maneuver around the world while avoiding enemies. In Silent Hill, turning around is effortless since the camera stays in the same place and shows you the same view of the player at any given time. In Siren however, the camera follows the player’s backside even if they make a quick turn. Combined with how close the camera is to the player, how often the camera clips through the player, and how limited the player’s field of view is, the turning action in Siren is more disorienting than it should be.
Camera issues aside, the controls are incredibly sluggish to use as well, and it takes a lot of time for the player to get used to this prolonged pace. Even doing basic tasks, such as climbing up a ledge, incites a struggle with the game’s controls. Though these bad controls can be dealt with, they become increasingly frustrating once the game’s difficulty begins to ramp up. While one can argue that the inefficient camera and sluggish controls are just another one of the game’s tools to incite more fear in the player, this ends up working against the game anyways since there’s so many other mechanics that are a struggle to deal with instead of a source of dread.
Its kind of ironic then, that the only difficult combat in Siren is the one where you fight against the game’s mechanics and controls. This doesn’t mean that the game doesn’t have combat, far from it, but it means that fighting against the game’s design is far more challenging and dread inducing than Siren’s actual combat mechanics, which are incredibly simplistic and can boil down to bashing enemies in the head until they’re dead. The combat is so uninspired and mechanical that its entirely possible to win just by mashing the button before the enemy even has a chance to react, effectively stun-locking enemies.
Another big issue the player must struggle with is the game’s map screen, which has received a mixed response from players. Some love the feature, and initially, I would be inclined to agree. In Siren, the player isn’t told where they are at any given point in time, just given a map and a series of landmarks to give them a sense of direction. At first, you feel a sense of unease and discomfort about your surroundings, since you don’t know where you are and have to learn the layout like you would when put in an unknown place in real life. However, this feeling turns into frustration as Siren introduces new maps and missions that require careful exploration, tricky movement or just repetitious backtracking.
The feeling of feeling stranded in a place and having to find your way around using only the landmarks that you can see is a good idea for a linear horror game. Yet, thanks to Siren’s more open-ended and repetitious structure, it requires a lot of patience to get through the game when you don’t even know where you are half the time, especially when landmarks are repetitious and very unclear. This issue is exacerbated by the game’s limited draw distance and dense fog. Once the player reaches a certain point, they aren’t looking to get scared, but instead want to quickly know where they are and where their objective is to waste less time going back through missions and completing side objectives.
Moreover, the idea just doesn’t work well with Siren’s design. In real life, its not so difficult to get your bearings with limited information because your senses are often reliable enough to identify what is around you. Siren, however, is not real life. In Siren you must struggle with a highly disorienting perspective, sluggish movement and low fidelity environments, which make it quite easy to get lost unless you spend the time to commit all the maps to memory.
Siren has a big issue with mission design, and this lacking design is what ruins some of its other and better mechanics like Sightjack. Every map was designed like a real location first and often different kinds of missions will take place in the same area across the game. The game’s developers tried to work around this limitation by making missions that worked around the level design and not backwards. This leads to missions that involve a basic repetition of the same task over and over, like escorting a character, or being merely forced to trek through a location that was not designed to accommodate the mission’s gameplay.
Mission design is generally a mixed bag, but more often than not its quite dull. It will either be too simple, involving easy tasks that only require the player to move from one point to the next; too convoluted, requiring that the player discover or decipher a puzzle that hardly has any time to introduce itself; or too annoying, like having to escort characters across the map while hoping they can catch up with you.
Another mission type that Siren has an overreliance on are stealth missions. Of course, it is not surprising that a horror game that has a strong focus on stealth would have lots of missions that take advantage of those mechanics, however, I find the implementation of stealth to be far from favorable in this game. In these types of missions, the player is left defenseless without a single weapon to engage enemies with, having to rely exclusively on sightjack to carefully evade enemies without being seen.
What makes this tedious is that the sightjack mechanic, which is a great source of fear, doesn’t translate very well into being a useful stealth tool for the player. Its far too simple and gives too little information to the player without having to spend a long time observing enemy patterns and committing them to memory. Moreover, its often senseless that the player can’t use Sightjack in more interesting ways other than learning enemy patterns. Once the player knows all this stuff, which they can learn through simple trial and error, there’s little reason to use sightjack other than to keep track of the most bothersome foes.
What’s even more frustrating about stealth in this game is that crouching, the most viable method to make as little noise as possible while moving, is an utter waste of the player’s time since it moves agonizingly slowly. Because the player can’t pick up weapons from downed enemies, in missions like these, crouching or slowly walking your way out of a situation is going to be your only shot of success, and this is frustrating because of how much time is frankly wasted on horrendously slow moving animations. This doesn’t increase the tension of the game so much as it just compounds more frustration and wasted time onto the pile.
In general, the problem with the stealth in Siren is that it relies too heavily on waiting exceptionally long amount of times for things to happen. Once again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when the exact same challenge is repeated over and over as the player has to either play through similar missions or replay missions to continue the story, then its easy to get tired of this very basic gameplay loop. The game’s lengthy runtime far exceeds the amount of patience and repetition that the player can take of this gameplay without getting completely tired of it.
On the topic of things that get tiresome quickly, Siren’s structure sounds interesting on paper, but quickly becomes one of the most irritating aspects of its presentation. The game requires the player to play through a loop of missions once, then play it again to access second objectives which lead to different loops entirely or even use future knowledge to unlock later missions in the future.
At face value, this composition feels like a challenging and peculiar puzzle where the player must use their knowledge of future events to make complex setups possible so they can advance on future stages in the story. However, this structure becomes frustrating because of the amount of repetition it inquires into the game’s pacing, as the player will be forced to play through the same missions over and over to unlock new content which diverges in non-sensical patterns that hardly follow the logical thread of events. One moment you will be following a character, the next you will be thrust into a completely different mission, at a different time, following a different character. It’s entirely too complicated to keep track of your first time through.
Most puzzles in Siren are massively frustrating. Taking cues from adventure game logic, to solve Siren’s most difficult puzzles you must make great leaps in logical thinking to proceed. One good example is a mission early on where, in order to obtain an ID from a Shibito, you must do the perfectly logical steps of going to an earlier mission, solving a key combination puzzle to obtain a wet towel, rinsing and then freezing that wet towel, and then using that wet towel in a later mission to break a piggy bank and distract the Shibito.
If that sounds horribly asinine, then get used to having to a great number of these inane puzzles. There’s hardly any rhyme or reason as to why some characters will do certain actions, but the game expects you to find out you have to do them anyways. More often than not, you’ll find out you’re missing an important piece of the puzzle once its too late and you have to go back and re-do earlier missions to even find out what you missed the first time. This would be easier if there was any indication or even logical progression to where a puzzle piece might be on any given mission, but the player is expected to waste time trying to find out what they are and where they are to begin with.
Although I praised the story to great extent earlier on, I do believe it’s a victim of Siren’s pointlessly convoluted ways. Its not really the text that’s flawed, but rather the way its presented to the player. The game jumps around from unrelated scenes far too often to give the player a sense of a cohesive narrative or let any of its story developments settle. Its difficult to step back and think about what’s going on when the spotlight can’t figure out which character it wants to focus on.
Siren’s chronology is a total mess; not because its internally inconsistent, but because of its particularly jumbled presentation. If Siren’s story presentation flowed better, then it wouldn’t be a complete headache to try to solve what’s going on. On the player’s first time through, they’ll have a hard time keeping track of what’s going on since missions jump around in the timeline, switch perspectives constantly and even have multiple branching paths to keep track of. If the story was told in a more concise way, then it wouldn’t be so insurmountable to try to solve the mystery. Having the story presented in such a way only compounds needless headaches that further stretches the amount of patience the player must have to play the game.
What Siren’s story needs is a good bit of editing. Though I appreciate its ideas very much and the drama is compelling enough to keep me invested, so much of what’s there could be cut down to make the narrative clearer. Take the game’s cast for instance, which is great and varied, but also features several characters like Naoko Mihama that didn’t deserve any of the spotlight due to how little they actually influence the events of the plot.
Another troubling aspect of the game’s cast is that it often doesn’t have a clear protagonist, one who guides the plot’s direction and guides the player through the events of the story without giving away the answers, much like Harry Mason from Silent Hill. Siren’s story is comprised of a number of side stories that all combine into a larger story, but the problem with this is that the player must at some point parse through all these vague and unrelated details to find an answer on their own. Though the process of finding the answer based on the details given is satisfying on its own, it can also be needlessly vague due to its lack of focus.
And that’s the core issue with Siren: vagueness and a lack of focus. While being obscure and confusing can lead to an experience that’s full of dread and horror, Siren takes it to such an extreme that it wears out quickly and just ends up becoming frustrating. After all, its not that these are all major issues, but they’re more like small tests of the player’s patience that all combine into what feels like massive time wasters that require a great deal of patience to accomplish, even if the reward of doing it all is not necessarily all that exciting.
I don’t dislike any of what Siren is trying to go for in theory. I don’t mind having a story with tons of different perspectives; a dense and detailed storyline that doesn’t give you all the answers; or tense, challenging survival horror gameplay. What bothers me about this game in particular is how it takes all these elements so far to the point of frustration that it becomes a drag. Siren is far too convoluted to be elegant or enjoyable as a horror game, which is completely unlike Silent Hill.
Of course, these issues are common and even individually bearable for the kind of genre and territory that Siren is trying to cover. I’m not going to turn up my nose if a survival horror game has sluggish controls or a vague storyline, but when you put all these elements together into a single game and take them to their extremes, the result is an experience that tests your patience to unfathomable levels and crosses a line that I believe most games shouldn’t cross to remain successful.
Keiichiro Toyama and Team Silent’s previous work combined all these seemingly frustrating elements into an elegant experience that was both challenging and scary while respecting the player’s time and patience. The storytelling was dense with detail, but the game did not give away all the answers to maintain that feeling of dread; the story was convoluted, but never to the point where you can’t follow what’s going on in your first playthrough; the gameplay was slow, but responsive; and the puzzles were cerebral, but perfectly reasonable. That’s why Siren lacks elegance in its design, because all its elements compound to an experience that’s too frustrating to be scary.
However, I don’t hate Siren and I still have a lot of respect for the game, even if it is begrudging respect. Despite all its difficulties and obscurities, Siren is also a game that takes honest chances to present an unconventional narrative in an unprecedented way. Besides, for all its frustrating gameplay and presentation, I still enjoyed its aesthetics and had a great time thinking about the intricacies of its plot. But would I recommend it to anyone for these reasons alone? Not at all. The game is such a frustrating and headache inducing test of your patience that I question how much of it makes the game succeed as a horror game or as a chore.
So, is it worth playing? Well, it all depends on how much patience you have for this kind of stuff. As for me, I think I’d rather be sucked into an otherworld myself.