I was pretty worried I would find Signalis to be too scary. Instead, I found Signalis to be too boring.
I’m not really a fan of horror and, as such, I have played basically zero games in this genre, including any of the Resident Evil games. So my closest analog to Signalis is “it’s like an old adventure game but with creepy monsters that keep getting in your way”.
Most of my major criticisms of this game are things that I think fans of this genre would consider to be standard features of survival horror games - things like an extremely limited inventory. I know this is done to make me pick and choose which tools to carry, but 50% of my time playing this game was just running back and forth between rooms and my storage as I juggle critical quest items with my three open inventory slots.
I also think fans of classic Resident Evil games will be no stranger to weird aiming, movement, and shooting controls. I never thought having to shoot 2-3 enemies slowly hobbling toward me would be annoying but it’s honestly some of the worst shooting controls I’ve ever experienced in a console game, new or old, and this game came out in the year 2022. I will never understand why modern game devs feel the need to make a brand new video game that feels and plays like a game from over 20 years ago. It reached the point pretty quickly where I began just running around the enemies to avoid combat because engaging with them was just annoying.
Beyond the bad combat controls, navigating the world with a controller sucks and is made all the more challenging by the overly dark environmental design that makes it difficult to see the items you’re supposed to be interacting with. I cranked the brightness all the way up and I still found myself bumping into black objects on the dark ground that I couldn’t see.
This game also has puzzles! Some of these puzzles are fun, some are incredibly simple, and some are as obtuse as the game’s story. From what little I could glimpse of the story from the cutscenes comprised of static images and flashes of screens that say “INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK”, it seems like there’s maybe an interesting mystery here, but I’m not really one for abstract storytelling and that’s the only language Signalis knows.
Overall, there were parts of Signalis I enjoyed - like when I was running around, collecting objects, and solving puzzles like a classic adventure game. But that is all bogged down by terrible inventory management, opaque storytelling, overly dark environmental design, and frequent annoying combat encounters.
+ Some neat puzzle solving and exploration
+ Cool art design
+ Interesting world (kind of)
- Terrible inventory management
- Combat feels bad
- Frequent enemies are a nuisance
- Obtuse, abstract storytelling
- Environmental design is far too dark
I’m not really a fan of horror and, as such, I have played basically zero games in this genre, including any of the Resident Evil games. So my closest analog to Signalis is “it’s like an old adventure game but with creepy monsters that keep getting in your way”.
Most of my major criticisms of this game are things that I think fans of this genre would consider to be standard features of survival horror games - things like an extremely limited inventory. I know this is done to make me pick and choose which tools to carry, but 50% of my time playing this game was just running back and forth between rooms and my storage as I juggle critical quest items with my three open inventory slots.
I also think fans of classic Resident Evil games will be no stranger to weird aiming, movement, and shooting controls. I never thought having to shoot 2-3 enemies slowly hobbling toward me would be annoying but it’s honestly some of the worst shooting controls I’ve ever experienced in a console game, new or old, and this game came out in the year 2022. I will never understand why modern game devs feel the need to make a brand new video game that feels and plays like a game from over 20 years ago. It reached the point pretty quickly where I began just running around the enemies to avoid combat because engaging with them was just annoying.
Beyond the bad combat controls, navigating the world with a controller sucks and is made all the more challenging by the overly dark environmental design that makes it difficult to see the items you’re supposed to be interacting with. I cranked the brightness all the way up and I still found myself bumping into black objects on the dark ground that I couldn’t see.
This game also has puzzles! Some of these puzzles are fun, some are incredibly simple, and some are as obtuse as the game’s story. From what little I could glimpse of the story from the cutscenes comprised of static images and flashes of screens that say “INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK”, it seems like there’s maybe an interesting mystery here, but I’m not really one for abstract storytelling and that’s the only language Signalis knows.
Overall, there were parts of Signalis I enjoyed - like when I was running around, collecting objects, and solving puzzles like a classic adventure game. But that is all bogged down by terrible inventory management, opaque storytelling, overly dark environmental design, and frequent annoying combat encounters.
+ Some neat puzzle solving and exploration
+ Cool art design
+ Interesting world (kind of)
- Terrible inventory management
- Combat feels bad
- Frequent enemies are a nuisance
- Obtuse, abstract storytelling
- Environmental design is far too dark
4 Comments
To me, the basic appeal of horror games like signalis is the unreliable stuff that keeps a little info away from you and tricks you so to speak. It's not a fully fleshed out shooter with exact numbers and visual info etc. You can't exactly tell how much damage your gun does or how much health you have left (since its color coded instead of again exact numbers), you can't fully tell how close you can get to enemies while you try to avoid them, you can't move that fast etc etc etc and at some point an enemy will get close to you. Even if you take the right decision it and make it, things feel wrong and you probably need to come up with something on the fly because you are going to make a mistake. You plan how to go from a to b but maybe you shoot more ammo than planned, open a door at the wrong time when an enemy is patrolling in front of you, move into a very close area where you are easy to gang etc etc etc.
This kind of horror game struggles to mantain the survival feeling until the end because saving too much ammo makes you too strong. You are trained to search every room for resources and destroy the pacing of the game. Most of the time, in this type of games there's only one way to mantain long lasting tension, like resi limiting resources so that you are worried about future encounters. Silent hill keeps save rooms far away from one another so that you dread the idea of losing a lot of progress. Immortal enemies are meant to take room inside your mind like in hide and seek stuff from slenderman onward. What signalis does is putting everything into one game well. Because the inventory has so little room and enemies are immortal, you aren't trained to save resources but to consume ammo etc as you pick things up, which reduces backtracking drastically and keeps you worried about future encoutners. Because it's so easy to spot items and enemies are immortal, you don't have to clear every single room and destroy the pacing of the game while still being able to train searching as a skill. Signalis inspirations only do one thing to mantain tension like I mentioned above but somehow signalis has all of them into one game without turning unplayable. I honestly wouldn't know what other horror game to recommend you that does all of this
smhomg
1 year ago