There's only so scary a videogame can be. As near as I can tell, that amount of scary maxxed out three years ago in Fatal Frame 3. But the next best things to scary are weird and unsettling. Those things maxxed out five years ago in Siren, which I'm guessing you didn't play. Frankly, I don't blame you. It was a strange game, and not just because of the Japanese mythology and scattered narrative

Although it was presumably a horror game, Siren played mostly like a stealth game. Instead of making your way around using a radar display, you "sightjacked" zombies, looking through their eyes to see what they could see and to learn their patterns. Then you jumped back into your body and dashed through the zombie blind spots. At least, that was the idea. The actual gameplay was a lot of dying that probably resulted in popping out the disk to play the most recent Silent Hill instead.

So I'm curious to see where Sony is going with the upcoming Siren: Blood Curse. They're still pushing the sightjacking concept, but among their bullet points are "over 50 kinds of weapons, each with unique fatal finishing move animations". That sounds like more emphasis on combat this time around, which might mean the stealth isn't so important. Commercially, that's probably a smart choice, even though I hate seeing horror games devolve into action games. It's also worth noting that the main characters are an American TV crew, which means the developers are trying to appeal to this side of the ocean a bit more. The original game was Japanese to a fault.

The twist is that Siren: Blood Curse isn't just a single game. It's a series split over 12 episodes, only available for download from the Playstation store. The price isn't announced yet, but it seems awfully convenient that the $60 cost of a PS3 game divided by 12 comes out to a tidy $5 (aka $4.99). At that price, you can just try a single episode and then ditch the series if you don't like it (surely the developers must know they have to start strong). Alternatively, you can wait to hear the word of mouth and then jump in "mid-season", as it were.

I support the idea, mostly because I put up with a lot of bad TV for the water cooler aspect. With episodic content, you're working your way through it in lockstep with everyone else. Like everyone else, you're curious about where it's going. So you all want to talk about it. In a way, it doesn't really matter if it's any good; what matters is that it's a social thing. I call it the "Lost" effect.

I also support Siren: Blood Curse because the screenshots are freaky. I didn't realize that I would be so weirded out by bleeding eyes. I'm going to go play Princess Bride now.