I have two big issues with SIGNALIS. Otherwise, it's mostly excellent.
Those two big issues are...
1. The inventory system. I can't believe at no point does the game offer the player the opportunity to upgrade the amount of inventory slots. You get a measly six, and you always have to carry your flashlight, a weapon and some ammo, so you tend to only have three slots to play around with. And it stays that way, THE WHOLE GAME! The last segment has enemies everywhere, in tight rooms where you simply can't run past them. Often, you have to go to the store cabinet, pick out a weapon fit for the situation, run off and use it, run back to the save room and switch weapons. And that's not even mentioning the many many times I ran out of room to store items, so I'd have to run back to a save room, dump what I had and then run back. It's a pain in the arse and gets really grating towards the end. I understand the devs are trying to mimic the old-school survival horror games of the PS1 era, but the funny part is that early Resident Evil did a better and more balanced job of creating tension through limited inventory space than SIGNALIS does.
2. The story suffers from a typical case of being overly cryptic and vague. You see this all the time in indie games. Developers will often opt for a storytelling aesthetic that leaves most of the events up to the interpretation of the player, but the main reason they do this is to create less work for themselves. Which, y'know, I get, because if only two people are working on a game then obviously money is going to be tight, but the fact of the matter is, SIGNALIS is too ambiguous for its own damn good. By the end credits, I felt like I was none-the-wiser as to what was going on. I had to look up theories on Reddit. This means I was nowhere near as invested as I wanted to be. Silent Hill 2 this ain't.
That's a lot of complaining for a positive score I know. Sorry to focus so much on the negatives, but SIGNALIS could so easily have been a mini-masterpiece. It gets pretty much everything else right. It's a love letter to the classic survival horror games in (mostly) all the right ways. It looks great, it sounds great, it's deeply oppressive (although not particularly scary) and the puzzles are varied, well balanced and satisfying to solve. I had a great time with it.
But it could have been perfect.
Those two big issues are...
1. The inventory system. I can't believe at no point does the game offer the player the opportunity to upgrade the amount of inventory slots. You get a measly six, and you always have to carry your flashlight, a weapon and some ammo, so you tend to only have three slots to play around with. And it stays that way, THE WHOLE GAME! The last segment has enemies everywhere, in tight rooms where you simply can't run past them. Often, you have to go to the store cabinet, pick out a weapon fit for the situation, run off and use it, run back to the save room and switch weapons. And that's not even mentioning the many many times I ran out of room to store items, so I'd have to run back to a save room, dump what I had and then run back. It's a pain in the arse and gets really grating towards the end. I understand the devs are trying to mimic the old-school survival horror games of the PS1 era, but the funny part is that early Resident Evil did a better and more balanced job of creating tension through limited inventory space than SIGNALIS does.
2. The story suffers from a typical case of being overly cryptic and vague. You see this all the time in indie games. Developers will often opt for a storytelling aesthetic that leaves most of the events up to the interpretation of the player, but the main reason they do this is to create less work for themselves. Which, y'know, I get, because if only two people are working on a game then obviously money is going to be tight, but the fact of the matter is, SIGNALIS is too ambiguous for its own damn good. By the end credits, I felt like I was none-the-wiser as to what was going on. I had to look up theories on Reddit. This means I was nowhere near as invested as I wanted to be. Silent Hill 2 this ain't.
That's a lot of complaining for a positive score I know. Sorry to focus so much on the negatives, but SIGNALIS could so easily have been a mini-masterpiece. It gets pretty much everything else right. It's a love letter to the classic survival horror games in (mostly) all the right ways. It looks great, it sounds great, it's deeply oppressive (although not particularly scary) and the puzzles are varied, well balanced and satisfying to solve. I had a great time with it.
But it could have been perfect.
kumasbear
1 year ago