Signalis is extremely polished. It’s a well made survival horror that takes heavy inspiration from Resident Evil and Silent Hill, to the point where one wonders if plagiarism truly exists. The word “homage” pops up in discussions about the “old-school” survival horror titles like Signalis and, frankly, I don’t get it. Like, if most indie survival horror titles end up being “homages” and “old-school”, what is supposed to be “new school”? Besides a bunch of franchised series like Call of Ctulhu, Amnesia, and a few odds and ends like Darkwood and Faith, there’s little that makes it out of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill “homage” hall of fame.
I have two problems with Signalis. First, this is a four-hour game stretched to an insane degree to almost ten with embarrassing key hunts that don’t add much to the story, nor to the environment. I’m not sure what the elemental keys, of which there are five, are supposed to represent. Second, there’s an unfortunate effect to the way Signalis chooses to tell its story, and it results in people deriving more enjoyment from “piecing it together” than experiencing it in the video game format. I’ve watched my fair share of analysis, and like many other stories told in this jumbled, intentionally vague format, beats end up sounding like conjecture more than points. I like to piece things together, but it’s more fun to adopt someone’s interpretation because I’m not going to research all the references while I’m gaming. It’s a strange way to tell a tale; because characters are either incapacitated, gone, or about to be MIA-ed, Signalis relies on real-world symbolism and historical references to communicate its plot. If you’re unfamiliar with the references, they muddy the intrigue. If you understand the references, you have to contend with the vagueness of time jumps.
My interpretation of the story, based on minimal understanding of all references, is that Ariane, an artistic girl living in a totalitarian hellhole, is forced by circumstances to join a military expedition that was set up by idiots who didn’t give her and her robot companion enough supplies for the journey back. Due to a memory malfunction, the robot companion develops feelings for Ariane. After their ship crashes on an alien planet, Ariane develops radiation poisoning. The robot hallucinates. Its primary directive is to keep a promise made to Ariane to kill her before the radiation poisoning consumes her. But because our character’s personality was partly copied from a real person, conflicting motivations make progress difficult. To me, everything else about the story is mostly conjecture. Sounds boring? Well, yeah. The game wants me to theorycraft and I… don’t. And I didn’t pay 15 Euros to feel bad that I didn’t theorycraft enough.
Part of the reason why people fall in love with this story is the aesthetic. While the anime portraits of in-game characters are unsavory at best, there’s a craftsman’s quality to how the game is rendered on screen. If I remember correctly, most of the game was generated in 3D then painted with pixel-art textures to create something that’s close to a pixel game, but not quite; almost like a simulacrum, a replica, if you will, of what we, modern audiences, understand as “indie survival horror game.”
Most of the game’s horror comes from sound. The sound quality ranges from unnerving to whatever the fuck is that insane scream that happens each time I save my game (I love it), which doubles its uncanny effect if you chose not to save, resulting in a “You will regret this” message. It’s the type of detail that’s often missing from AAA developers; only individuals with complete control over their product could think about introducing something like this.
Frequent trips to the saving room due to inventory restrictions make the game even more tedious than it already is. This is a Rain World situation; if something is so bad that indie developers min-maxing their sales numbers have to roll out a patch, it means it’s really bad, no matter what revisionist bots claiming “it’s supposed to be hardcore” say. The problem is that survival horror games don’t benefit from backtracking; backtracking results from wanting to optimize a character’s inventory for the trip ahead. A simpler solution to the inventory problem would have been to make all three hundred and fifteen keys and key-like items take up no inventory slot, since there’s no benefit in not having them at all times. We’re already stretching the suspension of disbelief limits with the inventory rooms; what’s the point in stretching them further with having a keycard take as much inventory space as a machine gun? Well, none, but Resident Evil does it, and here we are. But that’s an actual system, not a bunch of slots, so we’re not really talking about the number of slots, but about the backtracking required to place all keycards and keys in the correct holder.
I remember this mechanic in Darkwood that lets you give a bottle of alcohol to a biker dude and he’d carry all your meaningless shit–including key items–to another hideout. Signalis is set up in a futuristic setting; it’s not a stretch to imagine, like, technology that helps with moving things around. Conveyor belts and elevator shafts for small things like food trays come to mind, but small robots that don’t require the game’s bioresonance could accomplish the same results: putting the player in control of their decisions. System Shock Remake does this effectively, and for reasons I don’t comprehend, it’s sometimes called a “survivor horror”, too.
When you ask me to hunt for several keys that take inventory slots, then ask me to store them in inventory rooms, then ask to optimize my loadout before an encounter with the other unhinged robots, you’re asking all of this because you don’t want to relinquish control over the “right sequence” that matches what’s been seen in Resident Evil and Silent Hill. You’re not pushing the genre forward, but mimicking a gameplay loop that was stale and annoying long before 2022, partly because nostalgia-based mechanics are easier to market. I mean, it’s supposed to be “old school”, right? Key hunts are not gameplay; they are an excuse to streamline level design.
The combat isn’t so “old school”, however, which is good. The problem with combat in horror games is that developers go out of their way to make it annoying (because that’s what audiences demand, believe it or not), but in Signalis, they fortunately don’t. You have a wide set of tools that will help you dispatch your misdiagnosed cousins, and doing it effectively while saving ammo feels rewarding enough that I want to engage in combat. Based on my understanding, this mentality is how you reach the “best” ending, but since I don’t theorycraft, I can’t confirm this.
I’m not sure how to feel about Signalis. My first time ever playing it, I abandoned it in Nowhere because I felt the game wasted too much of my time with the key hunts, which are present in all major sections. I clocked in about seven hours then, and only finished the game a year later because I fell into that strange trap plenty of gamers fall into: wanting to “like” a game. It happens when something is, on paper, what you want to experience, but when you confront its flaws, “being careful what you wish for” becomes a mantra. Obviously, I recommend it solely on the basis of its polish, but it’s not something I would take with me in a top 25.