Just not really all that enamoured with this one I'm afraid.

People have been telling - sometimes begging me - to play this game for an incredibly long time now. My friends occupy a vast spectrum of opinions yet the one thing they can agree on is "Mira should play this game".

So I did.

And... Hoh boy, where do I start...?

Just to get the good out of the way first: This game is stunning. The animated cutscenes, the first person scenes, the environments, the music, the creature designs, the character designs, everything. If I was rating this game based on presentation it'd be 5/5 and sitting just underneath Disco Elysium on my favourites. Really, that 2.5 is because of the presentation alone.

The rest, though, is kind of exhausting. And not in a good way.

For starters, the gameplay is just... Not fantastic. I've seen an obscene amount of people regard it as a 'modern' take on classic survival horror, which is frankly kind of funny because it clings to survival horror trends that everybody got sick of in the early 00s. That, and the games it's inspired by are old enough to fuck.
I figured that the 6 inventory slot limit was in service to tension, that the choice between "convenience in ferrying items" and "safety in ammo/healing" was going to be a huge thing. That maybe, just maybe, the devs were aware why inventory limits sucked in older games and why even other retraux games either did away with them or had a key item feature.
So, anyway, before I quit Signalis the last two chapters were like 20% playing the game and 80% going backwards and forwards between the storage box and a 'puzzle' to hoist items around. The 'Nowhere' segment is really bad for this. Even with the expanded inventory (8 slots vs 6, also flashlight and screenshot eye don't take up slots), there's still an unholy amount of backtracking. There is, as it turns out, reasons to not be entirely faithful.

Not helping matters is that the enemy design, both visually and functionally, is really barebones? It's somehow worse at this than Resident Evil 1. Not the remake, the PS1 title. There are enemies that run at you. After that, there are enemies that run at you. After that, there are enemies that run at you. After that, there are big enemies that shoot at you and are only vulnerable for brief moments. After that, there are enemies that do nothing but fuck up the screen. After that, there's a boss that runs at you... You get the idea.

Towards the latter half of the game, the developers very obviously give up and just resort to throwing swarms at you. Here's four enemies that rush you, one shoots you, and there's also another hiding in the shadows. Have fun!

Normally, I'd just run past them, but I was informed early that the # of enemies killed affects the ending - for the better.

But none of this is why I quit, no. I have played worse survival horror games with worse inventories. I actually like Alone in the Dark 2008, after all.

No, I quit because this game's relationship to its influences is at best obnoxious and at worst, childish.

In the past I was told that this game was 'inspired' by numerous things: Lovecraft, the King in Yellow, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Evangelion, and so on. I took 'inspired by' to mean that it pulled from a diverse pool of influences, boiled them in a pot, and created something new.

And there is some original stuff in this game, buried under a thick crust of the just... endless, poorly executed shoutouts to better media. I will give this game one thing: It's a very interesting best-of compilation of media I'd rather be playing, watching or reading.

The core of Signalis is about a Replika (artificial human) named Elster looking for her Gestalt (real human) lover in a mining facility where, to put it gently, shit's fucked. If you're at all familiar with Nier then this will probably start ringing alarm bells, not helped by the fact that the premise of "emotionally unexpressive butch lesbian cares a lot about a waifish white haired girl" is the plot of Nier Replicant. Set amidst a backdrop of what is ostensibly analogous to life in late East Germany under decaying Soviet rule, Signalis uses a non-linear narrative and heavy ambiguity to tell a story with very few solid facts and numerous events which may or may not have happened.

And this is good, I like it. The love story on display here made my heart swell, as did Elster's steely determination to reach her lover and fulfill her promise - which is even reflected in the examine text, dude. It's phenomenal.

The problem is that it's a small minority of what's on screen. Besides the lackluster gameplay, Signalis primarily spends its time making references. References to other games, references to films the creator liked, references to eldritch literature, references to scientific concepts, etc etc. These references are obvious. Painfully, obnoxiously, immersion breakingly obvious. If you thought Nier Automata paying lip service to philosophers was inelegant, this game's intro makes it seem tactful.

At the end of the prologue, when the game truly 'starts', you find a copy of The King in Yellow lying around. Upon inspecting it, the game immediately throws its first mindfuck sequence at you while flashing quotes from Lovecraft's The Festival on screen with all the grace of a Skibidi Toilet skit. After it mercifully ends, you're deposited in a completely different area in a way which defies... everything, really.

I'll be honest and say that this scene kind of immediately soured me on the game's narrative. Perhaps it's because I'm really really sensitive to tropes common in ~mindfuck fiction~ or Lovecraft-derived tales, but it made a few facets of the narrative incredibly obvious. That the first hour has notes describing radiation sickness without naming it, NPCs finding Elster familiar, notes describing an unfamiliar woman around base (Elster) and other things really does not help.
It all comes to a head early on when you learn what "Bioresonance" is: The ability to project one's thoughts and feelings into someone else's mind, perhaps fatally. I think the game blew its load a bit too early with both of these, because it becomes immediately apparent that a lot of what's happening is either entirely imagined or not in tune with reality, and that time is looping.

I want to shout out one of my good friends here, because I wrote up what I thought this story was about and they had the grace to not tell me I was right. And I was, before even entering the worker's quarters, right about everything - except Alina, because I fell for that. Everything after is really just hammering it in, using imagery and references so hamfisted that they're legally considered actual pigs.

For example, it was obvious to me early on that there was a timeloop occurring. Sure enough, the worker's quarters opens with you falling into a massive pile of your own dead body. A generous player might think "Ah, maybe the Sierpinksi staff killed all their Elster units", but there are at least two notes (that I found) which shoot that down outright.

But to loop back to the topic of hamfisted references for a second, I really need to talk about the Nowhere segment. It's very obviously ripped from Silent Hill and not in a way I'd consider graceful or even respectful. The line between homage and plagiarism is monofilament thin but this game manages to stand on it.
'Nowhere' in the first Silent Hill is the final level, and the deepest part of the game's ongoing nightmare. It is covered in rust, flesh and other distinctly /red/ materials. As you navigate it, it becomes clear that Nowhere is reflecting reality to the point where several areas from the town are smashed together in a non-linear, impossible fashion.
'Nowhere' in Signalis is not the final level, but it is the final level of the first half. It is ostensibly the deepest part of Ariane's nightmare, covered in- Look I don't need to keep the bit going. You know what I'm whining about.

Once it's over, you experience what I can only describe as a slideshow of cheap Lovecraft references before the game reaffirms that yes, there is a time loop occurring. Hope you memorized the wall safe code.

To it's credit though, between the Act 1 (as I call it) and Act 2 transitions, there is Signalis' actual story here. And... I liked it. I wonder if people only ever discuss Elster/Ariane (and Falke) because it's the only part of this game which isn't reliant on some other piece of media. As I said up above, the love story is adorable. It is extremely heartening to just see two women be in love in a society which is tailormade to abolish love (and is also rife with allegories for being homophobic). But alas, this is a short segment.

I'm going to be deeply unkind for a moment: I am amazed that this game gets so much praise for its "smart" storytelling when it's so childish in its execution that it often feels like Tommy Wiseau wrote an adaptation of The Mask from The King in Yellow. The overly referential nature of the game isn't even in service to its own story and setting - which are great! - but simply in service to the references themselves. The store page references David Lynch, which is fitting because at times this game feels like Inland Empire if every other scene transition was a clip from a different movie.

Ultimately, it's this excessive abuse of references to horror media that did me in.

Let's talk about the worst scene in the game.

In the first Silent Hill, you meet a helpful girl named Lisa who hovers around and is generally the only friendly face you meet while you explore the game. She repeatedly tells you she doesn't have any memory of anything. After a pretty harrowing trek through Nowhere, you meet Lisa again. It turns out that she got her memories back, and that she's actually been dead the entire time. The Lisa you met is a construct of Silent Hill, and upon realizing that she isn't alive she turns red and basically dissolves - becoming a mook. She comes back near the end, and it turns out she had an antagonistic relationship with the big bad who she then murders.

In Signalis, you meet a helpful girl named Isa who hovers around and is generally the only friendly face you meet while you explore the game. She repeatedly tells you that she doesn't have many memories, and that like Elster she's looking for someone. She has an antagonistic relationship with the 'big bad' and eventually kills him, or tries to.
After a pretty harrowing trek through Nowhere - the deepest part of Signalis' nightmare which represents the gradual breakdown of Ariane's memories and her fear of a radiation induced death - you meet Isa again on Rotfront. Here, she finds out that her sister's been dead the entire time and promptly turns to rust. A short walk reveals Isa was dead the entire time to boot.

Rotfront in itself is painfully and obviously Lovecraft. It is 'the weird hidden village' trope played painfully straight. I don't like Bloodborne's DLC that much because it takes a lot of the implicit Lovecraftian elements and makes them agonizingly explicit with the Fishing Village. Rotfront runs into many of the same pitfalls, complete with a relatively insincere attempt at being a screwdriver for the plot.

I wouldn't know how it goes, though. The Isa scene was the last straw. I just did not want to give this game any more of my time- Or well, I did. But there's precious little Signalis here, and an exhausting amount of other works I'm already overfamiliar with.

At least I get why so many girls I know had Falke icons.