I'm not entirely sure why I bought Signalis, but I now know I was in error to do so. The most charitable thing I can say for the game is that I am absolutely not its target audience: I scare easily in horror games, have little interest in them, and have never played the early Resident Evil or Silent Hill titles Signalis is clearly looking to ape. Despite that, I gave Signalis the old college try only to find a mechanical mess of a game whose problems can't be waved off as genre convention.
Signalis is a really good example of incentives in game design and how they can undercut an experience. The game design starts off with some good ideas: inventory is limited to add consequence to combat encounters; there are no autosaves to ratchet up the tension; controls are clunky enough to discourage a more action-oriented style of play. All of these decisions seems like they would mesh well with a survival horror game, yet they ultimately are the undoing of anything resembling immersion in the game or its world.
The core of the issues lies in how optional all of the game's encounters are. The vast, vast majority of enemies can be ran around and avoided without fighting them. Given how limited resources are, this becomes the dominant strategy. Why waste ammunition or risk incurring damage when it's easier to hold the run button and weave around? It's also faster. On a base level, there's very little reason to engage in the resource management the game is very clearly pushing as a means of creating tense gameplay.
Without resource management being impactful, the limited inventory space suddenly becomes an inconvenience rather than a conduit for strategy. A good example played itself out many times over my run through the game. I'd have a full inventory, encounter a necessary key item pretty far from a safe house, and suddenly have a decision to make. I could run back to the safe house and rearrange my backpack to have space for the item, or just fire off some rounds to clear ammunition from my inventory to pick up the item. Or use a healing item unnecessarily again in the name of making space. Without the combat encounters putting stress on these resources, the player is free to essentially waste them. The whole exchange breeds contempt for the inventory system. Once I understood how the game worked, I never really needed to plan a load out. I wonder why the inventory was built this way to begin with, other than this system likely being similar to an old survival horror game.
The lack of an autosave feature is another way Signalis calls back to its inspirations, and this is another mechanical misfire. The threat of a death that will meaningfully reset progress only works if developers commit to that notion. There needs to be stakes, usually in the form of the time investment since the last save. Signalis refuses to raise these stakes through the vast majority of the game. Areas are small, with all of the action taking place within 20-40 seconds of a safe room. Players are free to run back to the safe room every time they accomplish something, no matter how small, thereby ensuring any death won't ding them too much. Hell, this constant saving is doubly encouraged by the previously mentioned inventory system; the only place to dump the items picked up on any excursion is the same place the player saves the game. The combination of the level design and the save system works to deflate the tension, which is a bizarre undercutting of the only possible reason to design the save system this way in the first place.
All of Signalis's mechanics seem half-cooked; a "wouldn't it be cool if" whiteboard list that never coalesced into a meaningful experience. Which is a shame, because aesthetically the game works much better. The graphics and sound design both do a good job in creating an unsettling atmosphere. But unfortunately that really doesn't mean anything when the gameplay doesn't work in service of the horror experience.
What players are left with is at times boring, at times frustrating, and thoroughly samey. No matter what is happening in the story you can count the fact that you, as the player, will be bobbing and weaving through enemies to find the square peg in room A, stick it in the square hole in Room B, to unlock access to the circle peg that is needed in Room C. Perhaps this is evocative of old Resident Evil games, which even I know have a reputation for this kind of nonsense, but I'm flabbergasted that someone thought it was engaging gameplay in 2022.
If they were set on making an homage to Resident Evil, they could've also copied the respect that game surely had for its players; I can't imagine there was ever a puzzle room in an RE game that had a note not five feet from the puzzle outlining its solution step-by-step.
I was beside myself when I found this. The puzzle it spoiled wasn't even difficult; none of the game's puzzles are difficult. Do the developers truly think that little of their audience?
I'll end by describing my last experiences with Signalis. I beat the game, found the ending to be lackluster, watched the credits, and looked up what people were saying online. I found some discussion of the final boss, an encounter I never had. Wouldn't you know it, the player is supposed to start up the game again to continue the story. So I did, and I played for another hour or so. What I expected to be a short story sequence opened up into a full 'dungeon' of sorts.
I'd had enough. I closed the game.
Signalis isn't scary. Signalis isn't fun. And for a game with a story that is so clearly open for interpretation, Signalis isn't even interesting, and that's what's most disappointing of all.
That's a lie, the most disappointing part is that it's not fun. God damn.
Signalis is a really good example of incentives in game design and how they can undercut an experience. The game design starts off with some good ideas: inventory is limited to add consequence to combat encounters; there are no autosaves to ratchet up the tension; controls are clunky enough to discourage a more action-oriented style of play. All of these decisions seems like they would mesh well with a survival horror game, yet they ultimately are the undoing of anything resembling immersion in the game or its world.
The core of the issues lies in how optional all of the game's encounters are. The vast, vast majority of enemies can be ran around and avoided without fighting them. Given how limited resources are, this becomes the dominant strategy. Why waste ammunition or risk incurring damage when it's easier to hold the run button and weave around? It's also faster. On a base level, there's very little reason to engage in the resource management the game is very clearly pushing as a means of creating tense gameplay.
Without resource management being impactful, the limited inventory space suddenly becomes an inconvenience rather than a conduit for strategy. A good example played itself out many times over my run through the game. I'd have a full inventory, encounter a necessary key item pretty far from a safe house, and suddenly have a decision to make. I could run back to the safe house and rearrange my backpack to have space for the item, or just fire off some rounds to clear ammunition from my inventory to pick up the item. Or use a healing item unnecessarily again in the name of making space. Without the combat encounters putting stress on these resources, the player is free to essentially waste them. The whole exchange breeds contempt for the inventory system. Once I understood how the game worked, I never really needed to plan a load out. I wonder why the inventory was built this way to begin with, other than this system likely being similar to an old survival horror game.
The lack of an autosave feature is another way Signalis calls back to its inspirations, and this is another mechanical misfire. The threat of a death that will meaningfully reset progress only works if developers commit to that notion. There needs to be stakes, usually in the form of the time investment since the last save. Signalis refuses to raise these stakes through the vast majority of the game. Areas are small, with all of the action taking place within 20-40 seconds of a safe room. Players are free to run back to the safe room every time they accomplish something, no matter how small, thereby ensuring any death won't ding them too much. Hell, this constant saving is doubly encouraged by the previously mentioned inventory system; the only place to dump the items picked up on any excursion is the same place the player saves the game. The combination of the level design and the save system works to deflate the tension, which is a bizarre undercutting of the only possible reason to design the save system this way in the first place.
All of Signalis's mechanics seem half-cooked; a "wouldn't it be cool if" whiteboard list that never coalesced into a meaningful experience. Which is a shame, because aesthetically the game works much better. The graphics and sound design both do a good job in creating an unsettling atmosphere. But unfortunately that really doesn't mean anything when the gameplay doesn't work in service of the horror experience.
What players are left with is at times boring, at times frustrating, and thoroughly samey. No matter what is happening in the story you can count the fact that you, as the player, will be bobbing and weaving through enemies to find the square peg in room A, stick it in the square hole in Room B, to unlock access to the circle peg that is needed in Room C. Perhaps this is evocative of old Resident Evil games, which even I know have a reputation for this kind of nonsense, but I'm flabbergasted that someone thought it was engaging gameplay in 2022.
If they were set on making an homage to Resident Evil, they could've also copied the respect that game surely had for its players; I can't imagine there was ever a puzzle room in an RE game that had a note not five feet from the puzzle outlining its solution step-by-step.
I was beside myself when I found this. The puzzle it spoiled wasn't even difficult; none of the game's puzzles are difficult. Do the developers truly think that little of their audience?
I'll end by describing my last experiences with Signalis. I beat the game, found the ending to be lackluster, watched the credits, and looked up what people were saying online. I found some discussion of the final boss, an encounter I never had. Wouldn't you know it, the player is supposed to start up the game again to continue the story. So I did, and I played for another hour or so. What I expected to be a short story sequence opened up into a full 'dungeon' of sorts.
I'd had enough. I closed the game.
Signalis isn't scary. Signalis isn't fun. And for a game with a story that is so clearly open for interpretation, Signalis isn't even interesting, and that's what's most disappointing of all.
That's a lie, the most disappointing part is that it's not fun. God damn.