- Game: Rose-engine's Signalis.
- Release Month: October.
- Quick Look: Here (Jess / Grubb).
- Started: 05/12.
- Completed: 06/12.
Signalis is the type of game where you just have to sit back in your chair with your head in your hands once it's through to take in everything you just witnessed. I have other nuggets of approbation for the game too, but the first and foremost is just that wave of style that washes over you and just how elusive it chooses it be about its broader story beats and the semiotics involved. But look at me already invoking ten-dollar vocabulary like semiotics when we've yet to get started. Excuse me. Signalis is a stealth action third-person survival horror game that is equal parts Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Ghost in the Shell, and sci-fi movies from the late '60s and '70s when they got deeply philosophical for a while. The plot concerns an "Elster" unit replika—a realistic human gynoid with a psychically-transferred human soul (or something? Imported memories at least) that each occupy a different role in this future society, with the Elsters (German for magpies: all replikas are named for birds) being lone survival experts—attempting to track her human (or "gestalt") partner after the two crash-land in their exploration starcraft and become separated. This leads her to an underground mining base on the distant ice planet of Leng that has seen better days, frankly; turns out there's much more going on here beneath the surface than just a bunch of lady robots shooting lasers at rocks. That applies to the whole narrative too, and the player's role in same.
The Resident Evil aspect is most apparent in how the game plays. You're skulking around a remote space colony full of zombie-like creatures while being very conservative with your ammo and other supplies, all the while finding key items and figuring out how to use them to solve puzzles and open new gateways. As your inventory is strictly limited to six items—the "rule of six" being a recurring motif—this often means difficult decisions regarding what to leave behind in storage. For instance, you could take a gun or ammo for that gun but realistically not both if you want to leave room for newly found supplies: instead, you make sure the gun is fully loaded and leave the ammo in your magical storage crate (since they're all linked across save rooms) for later. Likewise, you might have some emergency stun batons—they work similar to the knife in recent Resident Evil games, in the sense that they're one-hit-KO weapons that break immediately after use—or an autoinjector that can automatically save you from death, or a flashlight for dark rooms: all are equipped on the same module slot though, so you're better off only taking one. With that inventory scarcity in mind, you pick the battles that seem the most integral and otherwise avoid fighting whenever possible. A zombie patrolling a hallway with a predictable pattern is one you leave to its merry devices, for instance, as you should be able to avoid it each time you pass through. Another ghoulie staring directly at the door to the save room, though, is necessarily dead meat. Or, well, deader meat. Defeating enemies by knocking them down and finishing them with a kick means they're out of commission... for a while. By burning a very precious resource you can permanently eliminate them too, but that's not something you're going to be able to do for every foe that might give you ongoing headaches. This probably all sounds very familiar to any RE fan, but it's my first rodeo with a game of this particular build so I had to learn some vital lessons very quickly.
I brought up Metal Gear Solid and, while the game does encourage using stealth to get around including hugging darker areas and avoiding anything that might make you conspicuous (loud noises when running, or turning your flashlight on), the comparison comes more from the game's very distinct PlayStation 1 aesthetic. It doesn't quite go the full hog—none of that telltale texture warping—but the lo-fi polygon style is both very striking and adds to the uncanny nature of the game world, its characters, and most of all its enemies. Those graphics really shine when the game switches to first-person, as it only does at a few pivotal moments. Masamune Shirow's seminal sci-fi manga and the resulting movie/anime franchise Ghost in the Shell deals a lot with spirits in the machine—the notion of inorganic consciousness—but the cutscene and close-up character graphics are highly reminiscent of its heightened anime style also and the protagonist has that Major Kusanagi balance of hardness and softness: the former in the brutal application of her military training, the latter in the incongruous empathy and capacity for love that drives her character growth. I'd point to a few of the movies I was thinking of, like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris, but maybe describing how they're similar could give away too much. Stylistic similarities include how dialogue is conveyed through words on the screen backed by classical music in lieu of voice acting and most of the narrative is delivered through epistolary means as is often the case with the survival horror genre. When objective reality seems to start breaking down midway through the game and you're dropped into some unfamiliar territory where all the walls and furnishings are made of flesh and rusty metal, there's a vague feeling that you're seeing the world through the eyes of some alien entity that doesn't really understand the difference between this new location and the more standard spacefaring structures that were presented earlier. There's much to interpret from the game's symbolism about what, exactly, it is you're up against but much is purposefully left unclear. After all, you're here to complete the very grounded and human directive of finding your partner, and getting involved with bizarre, chaotic psychic phenomenon or unknowable alien intelligences (if, indeed, either are involved) is far beyond your pay grade as a replika unit. It's not exactly a super pretentious game either: I found the distinct storytelling format to be totally germane to the rest of the game's disquieting vibe. If anything, a survival horror game dealing with the unknown should be presented in as eccentric (but still just about comprehensible) a means as possible. For what it's worth, it felt like the worldbuilding was highly researched too: there was something familiar about this sorta Soviet but German-speaking universe that prized contributions to society as a whole over that of the individual's own desires (and the opposing views held by the antagonistic Empire) that felt like an alternative post-WW2 timeline, but for the fact that its entire star system was fictional.
If I have issues with Signalis, they're generally pretty minor. Many enemies are constantly in motion doing their patrols or walking back to their origin points if you happened to spook them, so what can happen a lot is that you'll instantly plow into one as soon as you enter an area and take damage before you know what's what. The screen also does a poor job of scrolling upwards, unless there was a way to do so manually I didn't ascertain, so I'd often find myself a handful of feet away from an irate monster because it just wasn't visible yet. I played on the Survival difficulty for the sake of achievements (which might've been in error) but I will say that I did eventually beat the game in spite of my unfamiliarity with Resident Evil mechanics and old man reflexes both, and the game does that thing you always want to see but is so hard for developers to pull off where you're constantly stressed that there aren't enough of the finite resources to go around until you've reached the end and realized you've picked up a fairly decent stock regardless (got real close to being completely dry on ammo for a couple bosses though, and it's not like falling back to melee is an option; the best you can there is shove a close-up enemy back a few feet before they shank you with their knives). It possibly goes without saying that there's a huge amount of backtracking in a game like this: whether you're hoofing it back to the opposite side of the current zone because you just found the key you needed to open a door over there, or you're loaded up on supplies and need to drop some of them off at the storage box at the nearest save spot, most of the game time is spent moving through the same handful of corridors trying to avoid being accosted by the unholy terrors that have set up shop there. Last, and perhaps even more obvious, for as much as the PS1 graphics helps to obfuscate the gore there's a lot of realgnarly body horror stuff involved here; just know that if you're getting into the game because someone recommended its presentational chops that you're going to be faced with a lot of viscera and bad times (also a lot of flashing lights and glitchy screen degradation, if either of those don't play nice with a specific condition you might have).
I really think Signalis is something special, and I'd urge anyone to try it even if Resident Evil or survival horror in general isn't their (limited capacity) bag. Unless you have a super weak stomach for blood and guts or can't sleep after consuming the type of enigmatic psychological horror that gnaws away at your thought processes, it's a story worth seeing through on any difficulty level that suits your preferences (with "Survival" being totally doable, so feel free to try it for a while and drop it if it's not clicking) just because of the confidence and ambition with which that tale is relayed. It's a stylistic masterpiece and something I'd liken to Soma or Detention in that exploring those well-considered settings, taking in the heady themes and real-life equivalences, and an ever-present urge to see what would happen next due to how often it would pull the rug out from underneath you was enough motivation to push the player through some terrifying and/or challenging and/or annoying encounters. So many horror games are content to deliver jumpscares or an unsettling atmosphere to buoy you through some occasionally repetitive gameplay, but few can really get under your skin with their narrative deliveries and bigger mysteries; mysteries that they might not even feel compelled to explain.
Current GOTY
- Elden Ring
- Tunic
- Signalis
- HoloCure
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