Despite not doing anything particularly groundbreaking with the survival horror genre - its mechanics a delightful mesh of everything that worked in the classics, with a particular emphasis on Resident Evil HD - Signalis doesn't feel like it's threading old ground in the slightest. Its triumphs, I believe, stem from the fact that it doesn't at all feel like it's trying to be like any of its particular inspirations, a list that includes Silent Hill, Evangelion, Lovecraft, the retrofuturism movement, and even pieces of real-world history like the Cold War. In that sense, despite feeling very much like a particular something, the vastness from which it pulls makes it impossible to narrow down that particular something into a single thing, leaving a dream-like experience that feels at once both familiar and unfamiliar: the dream-about-dreaming quality that defines the true identity of Signalis.

And it works marvelously in action, a maze of a story that compliments the literal mazes that you will be traversing through the game's 8 to 10 hour duration. Each story beat takes you deeper both into the characters' psyches as well as literally deeper into the holes and crevices that structure the progression of Signalis. Each puzzle presented raises another question about the world, each monster killed awakens a new anxiety about your limited resources. It's an experience that feels incredibly cathartic to finish, and that I couldn't help but replay as soon as it was done.

Nitpicking though, this game made me realize why the early Resident Evils limit saves with the use of an item, as the survivor difficulty in Signalis, combined with its incredibly limited inventory space, incentivizes a gameplay loop in which the player is constantly taking the safest route to and from safe rooms, hurting the heightened sense of tension that it should provide. Were I to rebalance it, I'd add a consumable that would be used to save the game and compensate for it by adding a single extra inventory slot.