Signalis is the debut production by rose-engine, a two-person team made up of Barbara Wittmann and Yuri Stern. This is a strong survival horror action game. There's a mechanical emphasis on scarcity, on being thoughtful with your actions. Every attack costs ammunition of some kind, and the game doesn't dole out enough ammunition for you to ever feel too comfortable for too long. As well, your character can only carry six items. There's even an in-fiction reason for it—there's a somewhat spiritual tenet of the culture called The Rule of Six. As you continue to play the game, you learn that having certain items can be dangerous for the androids, in that they may develop problematic, rebellious personalities if they interact with certain ideas or objects; the Rule of Six, which forces you to carefully balance the weapons you're carrying (each taking one slot), the ammunition types (another slot), special items, or keys, while leaving room for pick-ups you might encounter in the world, is a means of oppression, and you feel it. In fact, my only major problem with this game was the number of times I had to backtrack to pick up items or bring the rest of the keys to a door, since some doors can require six keys. This limitation, like the scarce ammo and health drops, successfully evoke the mood its trying to establish.
The art and narrative design of Signalis recalls a lot of other games—the game is honestly homage heavy, which I don't mind, but it might bug others. I might not mind it because I've also been inspired by so much of the same stuff.
The idea of the diametrical replikant/gestalt is straight out of the replicant/gestalts in Nier: Replicant, and the way there is an attempt to manage and control the replikants from developing personalities, and the way similar personalities develop for similar robots regardless of their station, is very Nier: Automata. The first wall safe combination includes the numbers 0451, an homage to the Looking Glass/Ion Storm games. (When I got to this safe I actually tried 0451 to open it, which I always do, but it didn't work; I felt really smart when I completed the puzzle to get the code and it had 0451 in there.) Plugging the various keys into the doors is reminiscent of the colored plates puzzle from Silent Hill, and in general the puzzles recall the first three Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. (And you're constantly jumping down or crawling through holes, like in Silent Hill.) I was also reminded of Control a few times—there's the censorship of certain key-words, and the design of the mine level reminded me a lot of Control's Black Rock Quarry. There's a lot of anime influence. The character designs are reminiscent of the anime Ergo Proxy and Tsutomu Nihei's manga BLAME!, or GANTZ. There's an unmistakable Neon Genesis Evangelion influence in the way the story develops towards its emotionally driven cosmic climax; there's also a weird fiction (my favorite kind) influence in the story: you find a copy of The King In Yellow in the game, and certain places reminded me a lot of what I imagined when reading The Fisherman by John Langan. The HUD and menus also seem inspired by Evangelion. There's an industrial looking funicular elevator that evokes the ones in Evangelion, Akira, and Metal Gear Solid. And of course there's a lot of Alien in the industrial spaceship and planet base designs. The PS1 style models, where the faces are fragmented into polygons evoking the ideas of a face, are used for cut scenes, and are reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill. The game also references The Isle of the Dead), a series of paintings done by Arnold Böcklin who created many different versions of it, and which is homaged often in art, from artists like Salvador Dali to movies like Alien: Covenant.
But the game isn't just its influences. It's effortlessly stylish. The use of German in HUDs and cut-scenes are just cool; the cut-scenes themselves have a rapid editing and strange style to them, cutting between anime style drawn close-ups of characters or objects, text, tech HUDs. The game enters first person in certain spaces, and there are full first-person interludes that gives the game a nice pace. I dug this game, and I'm excited to see where rose-engine goes next.
The art and narrative design of Signalis recalls a lot of other games—the game is honestly homage heavy, which I don't mind, but it might bug others. I might not mind it because I've also been inspired by so much of the same stuff.
The idea of the diametrical replikant/gestalt is straight out of the replicant/gestalts in Nier: Replicant, and the way there is an attempt to manage and control the replikants from developing personalities, and the way similar personalities develop for similar robots regardless of their station, is very Nier: Automata. The first wall safe combination includes the numbers 0451, an homage to the Looking Glass/Ion Storm games. (When I got to this safe I actually tried 0451 to open it, which I always do, but it didn't work; I felt really smart when I completed the puzzle to get the code and it had 0451 in there.) Plugging the various keys into the doors is reminiscent of the colored plates puzzle from Silent Hill, and in general the puzzles recall the first three Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. (And you're constantly jumping down or crawling through holes, like in Silent Hill.) I was also reminded of Control a few times—there's the censorship of certain key-words, and the design of the mine level reminded me a lot of Control's Black Rock Quarry. There's a lot of anime influence. The character designs are reminiscent of the anime Ergo Proxy and Tsutomu Nihei's manga BLAME!, or GANTZ. There's an unmistakable Neon Genesis Evangelion influence in the way the story develops towards its emotionally driven cosmic climax; there's also a weird fiction (my favorite kind) influence in the story: you find a copy of The King In Yellow in the game, and certain places reminded me a lot of what I imagined when reading The Fisherman by John Langan. The HUD and menus also seem inspired by Evangelion. There's an industrial looking funicular elevator that evokes the ones in Evangelion, Akira, and Metal Gear Solid. And of course there's a lot of Alien in the industrial spaceship and planet base designs. The PS1 style models, where the faces are fragmented into polygons evoking the ideas of a face, are used for cut scenes, and are reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill. The game also references The Isle of the Dead), a series of paintings done by Arnold Böcklin who created many different versions of it, and which is homaged often in art, from artists like Salvador Dali to movies like Alien: Covenant.
But the game isn't just its influences. It's effortlessly stylish. The use of German in HUDs and cut-scenes are just cool; the cut-scenes themselves have a rapid editing and strange style to them, cutting between anime style drawn close-ups of characters or objects, text, tech HUDs. The game enters first person in certain spaces, and there are full first-person interludes that gives the game a nice pace. I dug this game, and I'm excited to see where rose-engine goes next.
Odintheprole
1 year ago