Might scare some people

Apr 18, 2008 07:30 GMT  ·  By

Some people might have noticed a blood-drenched page on the Sony website. It seems that magazine Famitsu has found out that the page is there to advertise the fact that a game called Siren New Translation, based on the Forbidden Siren setting, is now in development.

Forbidden Siren was thought up by Keiichiro Toyama, the guy who also imagined the Silent Hill concept. The game bears some resemblance as they both focus on occult and ultimately demonic rituals that take place in places that are somehow disconnected from the rest of the world. The sense of supernatural is even stronger in Forbidden Siren, where the playing space is surrounded by a sea of red water, some say blood, that creates a separate pocket of space and time.

The original game focused on the way a cast of characters with rather different backstories, ranging from nurse to ex-military man, confronted a situation where a being known as the Datatsushi turned the residents of a village into zombie-like creatures that then began to built a physical form which could house the Datatsushi.

The player had to make sure that he didn't alert the transformed villagers of his actions while trying to learn more about the being itself, its aims and how it could be stopped. There was an interesting gameplay concept that allowed the player to "receive" signals from the zombie villagers which made it possible to see their field of view and then plan a route that did not allow detection.

As far as the Famitsu reporting goes, the game is set to be re-imagined by the people at Sony, with a tentative release date of July in Japan and a demo version apparently coming out on the PlayStation Store on April 24. Which is a good thing if you're a fan of Japanese survival horror.