It's like everything was taken apart and put back together by something that didn't understand how it worked.
What a trite observation it's become to look at a piece of horror and say it's a story about love.
Signalis is a story about love.
What's here is deceptively deep. Loss and grief is rot, unfinished business is cancer. Those who can let go melt away into sludge; those who cannot are mutated and made to betray themselves. These themes curl through every facet of the game as the tendrils of the flesh heaps dotting the darkened corridors. Enemies you face embody the concept of clinging on in spite of everything around them — nothing in this place stays dead unless it's burnt to ash. Every corrupted Replika has been twisted into an ironic monster: the empathic Kolibri see their synthetic brains bulging from their skulls, spiraling themselves and the units around them into negative feedback loops; the gentle Mynah morph from explicitly not-for-combat mining units into hulking, bleeding, laser-wielding tanks; the socialite Eule are damned as cannon fodder beneath the banner of a fascist army in life and in death. Nobody can escape the inevitable end of their lives, but death here offers no escape. They will die. They will get back up. You will die, and you will do the same. Nothing in this place stays dead.
I have an immense appreciation for how willing the game is to overload your senses. Never has a photo-sensitivity warning been more needed; mechanical pounding and shrieking and groaning litter the soundscape, sharp and harsh, piercing your ears and rumbling your skull. Text and images flash by faster than they can be processed, leaving you with nothing but fragments to be pieced together. Pulsating, ever-growing meat contrasts against sterile, blocky CRT monitors and security cameras. The low-fidelity visual aesthetic of the gameplay doesn't gel flawlessly with the anime-esque cutscenes, but it's unique, and that's enough for me. There's been a bit of a resurgence among indie developers (especially in the horror space) of flocking to low-poly "PS1" styles en masse, and I think it's a good trend. Eight full years of development on Signalis have led to what's probably going to be to the retro PlayStation style what Wind Waker or Jet Set Radio were to cel shading. This will be the one to beat.
Combat is pretty simple, and mostly easy to avoid entirely. I finished the game with dozens of healing sprays, thermite charges, and ammo boxes still overflowing from my item storage. The hard six-item limit definitely feels too restrictive, and a more lenient inventory cap would have allowed for a bit more freedom of experimentation and less backtracking. As stated above, the fact that nothing dies unless you burn it can make the act of backtracking tense, but it's also a bit too effortless to carve a guaranteed enemy-free path towards the safe room once you know where it actually is. The Replikas don't follow you between rooms, and it's incredibly easy to just panic sprint from one door to another past them; Replikas won't spawn into cleared-out areas, nor will they wander through them, and this leads to a lot of rooms feeling static. There's probably a reason for this. There are hallways later in the game that are so tight that you can't feasibly get through them without gunning down the Replikas in your way, so the fact that combat is so easily ignored in earlier areas has to be intended. It's not a bad choice, but it's odd. Still, this is the kind of game that's begging to be broken wide open and speedran.
The game's influences are the most obvious thing about it, and are conversely the least interesting to discuss. Yes, the music is like Silent Hill. Yes, it has Resident Evil inventory management. Yes, it kind of looks like Metal Gear Solid. Yes, there are shots from End of Evangelion in it. These things are evident, and they're boring to talk about, because Signalis stands shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with the pieces that inspire it. Where the game starts to lose me is in how clunkily it tries to incorporate some of these outside parallels directly into the universe of Signalis: Creative Commons photos of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead flash across the screen at several points of the story. The flags and propaganda posters are all rooted in the aesthetics of the GDR down to the colors and emblem of the flag, and the Rotfrontkämpferbund provide the namesake of a both a planet and a playable zone. The King in Yellow pops up several times, with Elster stating that the book physically "calls to [her]". H.P. Lovecraft makes it into the credits, as does Ambrose Bierce. These incorporations are sloppy. For a game that seems to pride itself on being cryptic (with a moment at the halfway point that will probably result in a lot of prematurely-ended playthroughs), all of these inclusions feel as if they were appended into this world after the fact. They stick out at unnatural angles. The moments where the game lets our history seep into its own feel awkward and lacking in substance against a narrative that can be genuinely alien, challenging, and ambiguous.
For all of my griping, though, this game is an achievement on the part of the two core members of rose-engine. It's easy to weaponize that — "don't complain, it was only a two-person dev team, it's their first try at a major release" — but you don't need to do that to defend Signalis. It stands on its own without needing the excuse. I want more games like this. Not ones that play like Signalis, but ones that are made like it. I want more producers to dump enough funding into the laps of creatives that they can pour a decade of their lives into making something they care about without needing to worry about the money running out. I want more developers to take the risks they want to take and have the freedom to make unorthodox choices. These are entirely uncontroversial statements, but this is a game that I want to see succeed. I want lessons to be taken from this, because there's a lot to be learned from. Signalis is excellent and flawed, beautiful and grotesque, and it deserves whatever moments in the spotlight that it can get. I'm very glad to see it finding an audience.
What a trite observation it's become to look at a piece of horror and say it's a story about love.
Signalis is a story about love.
What's here is deceptively deep. Loss and grief is rot, unfinished business is cancer. Those who can let go melt away into sludge; those who cannot are mutated and made to betray themselves. These themes curl through every facet of the game as the tendrils of the flesh heaps dotting the darkened corridors. Enemies you face embody the concept of clinging on in spite of everything around them — nothing in this place stays dead unless it's burnt to ash. Every corrupted Replika has been twisted into an ironic monster: the empathic Kolibri see their synthetic brains bulging from their skulls, spiraling themselves and the units around them into negative feedback loops; the gentle Mynah morph from explicitly not-for-combat mining units into hulking, bleeding, laser-wielding tanks; the socialite Eule are damned as cannon fodder beneath the banner of a fascist army in life and in death. Nobody can escape the inevitable end of their lives, but death here offers no escape. They will die. They will get back up. You will die, and you will do the same. Nothing in this place stays dead.
I have an immense appreciation for how willing the game is to overload your senses. Never has a photo-sensitivity warning been more needed; mechanical pounding and shrieking and groaning litter the soundscape, sharp and harsh, piercing your ears and rumbling your skull. Text and images flash by faster than they can be processed, leaving you with nothing but fragments to be pieced together. Pulsating, ever-growing meat contrasts against sterile, blocky CRT monitors and security cameras. The low-fidelity visual aesthetic of the gameplay doesn't gel flawlessly with the anime-esque cutscenes, but it's unique, and that's enough for me. There's been a bit of a resurgence among indie developers (especially in the horror space) of flocking to low-poly "PS1" styles en masse, and I think it's a good trend. Eight full years of development on Signalis have led to what's probably going to be to the retro PlayStation style what Wind Waker or Jet Set Radio were to cel shading. This will be the one to beat.
Combat is pretty simple, and mostly easy to avoid entirely. I finished the game with dozens of healing sprays, thermite charges, and ammo boxes still overflowing from my item storage. The hard six-item limit definitely feels too restrictive, and a more lenient inventory cap would have allowed for a bit more freedom of experimentation and less backtracking. As stated above, the fact that nothing dies unless you burn it can make the act of backtracking tense, but it's also a bit too effortless to carve a guaranteed enemy-free path towards the safe room once you know where it actually is. The Replikas don't follow you between rooms, and it's incredibly easy to just panic sprint from one door to another past them; Replikas won't spawn into cleared-out areas, nor will they wander through them, and this leads to a lot of rooms feeling static. There's probably a reason for this. There are hallways later in the game that are so tight that you can't feasibly get through them without gunning down the Replikas in your way, so the fact that combat is so easily ignored in earlier areas has to be intended. It's not a bad choice, but it's odd. Still, this is the kind of game that's begging to be broken wide open and speedran.
The game's influences are the most obvious thing about it, and are conversely the least interesting to discuss. Yes, the music is like Silent Hill. Yes, it has Resident Evil inventory management. Yes, it kind of looks like Metal Gear Solid. Yes, there are shots from End of Evangelion in it. These things are evident, and they're boring to talk about, because Signalis stands shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with the pieces that inspire it. Where the game starts to lose me is in how clunkily it tries to incorporate some of these outside parallels directly into the universe of Signalis: Creative Commons photos of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead flash across the screen at several points of the story. The flags and propaganda posters are all rooted in the aesthetics of the GDR down to the colors and emblem of the flag, and the Rotfrontkämpferbund provide the namesake of a both a planet and a playable zone. The King in Yellow pops up several times, with Elster stating that the book physically "calls to [her]". H.P. Lovecraft makes it into the credits, as does Ambrose Bierce. These incorporations are sloppy. For a game that seems to pride itself on being cryptic (with a moment at the halfway point that will probably result in a lot of prematurely-ended playthroughs), all of these inclusions feel as if they were appended into this world after the fact. They stick out at unnatural angles. The moments where the game lets our history seep into its own feel awkward and lacking in substance against a narrative that can be genuinely alien, challenging, and ambiguous.
For all of my griping, though, this game is an achievement on the part of the two core members of rose-engine. It's easy to weaponize that — "don't complain, it was only a two-person dev team, it's their first try at a major release" — but you don't need to do that to defend Signalis. It stands on its own without needing the excuse. I want more games like this. Not ones that play like Signalis, but ones that are made like it. I want more producers to dump enough funding into the laps of creatives that they can pour a decade of their lives into making something they care about without needing to worry about the money running out. I want more developers to take the risks they want to take and have the freedom to make unorthodox choices. These are entirely uncontroversial statements, but this is a game that I want to see succeed. I want lessons to be taken from this, because there's a lot to be learned from. Signalis is excellent and flawed, beautiful and grotesque, and it deserves whatever moments in the spotlight that it can get. I'm very glad to see it finding an audience.