Signalis – Review

If you want to play as Replika Elster, Signalis will make you sort through a tangle of writhing flesh and broken memories until you can tell fantasy from reality. The logic of dreams dictates, then: You’ve played games like Signalis before, but nothing quite like it. There is a clear appreciation for the systems, aesthetics, tropes, and technical limitations that made survival horror games of the PlayStation 1 era so compelling, and this is reflected in the game’s enthusiastic adoption of those elements. At the same time, it presents and investigates these other themes—love and loss; freedom and manipulation; fear and trauma—in its own cruelly captivating way. It’s both unfamiliar and recognisable, beautiful and dreadful. Given its low price and small development team of just two people, it’s even more impressive that the game is such a smash hit.

It’s a love story at heart. Even though Elster, a space technician, is having a rough time of it, she has a promise to keep. Eventually, we’ll revisit this topic. As a starting point: Signalis does an excellent job of capturing the essence of survival horror, specifically the conflicting feelings of hope and dread one experiences when walking down a long hallway with doors on either side, only to discover that all but two of the doors are locked or broken. You know you’ll be back here eventually. Most likely with a different key. Perhaps if you got a new gun. However, it’s also possible that by that time, things will have shifted. A floor tile might reveal new horrors. You might have spent your last bullet. So, left or right? Or maybe back? You can only carry six items, after all.

Let’s have a chat about the stock we have. The developers of Signalis, Rose-Engine (did I mention it’s just two people! two! ), have already promised to add a patch that will allow players to increase their inventory size, which is great news. But personally, this limitation – and all the planning, backtracking, and lovely, lovely stress it caused me – gives Signalis so much of its character and bite that I can’t imagine playing without it. The game is made of interconnected, shortcut-laden spaces. Backtracking through them brings their design to life and can feel like a puzzle in and of itself as you try to find your way through them safely. Those who feel this artificially extends the amount of time they can play the game are entitled to their opinion, and I can understand and respect that. Me? I spent last Halloween old-man griping about the lack of this in modern survival horror in these very pages, so I obviously got so ecstatic to discover Signalis trespassing on my lawn that I immediately spat my Monster energy all over my Metallica shirt.

Hearty embracing of the wonderfully tense potential of early 90’s genre conventions aside, though, you’d have a hard time calling Signalis dusty or antiquated in other areas. It really does go the extra mile to make things as smooth as possible, with only the occasional unnecessary button press through a menu, so you can save your negative emotions for the things they were meant for. I’ll be the first to admit that some fans of 90s survival horror lore and games fetishize the wrong kinds of friction; thankfully, Signalis knows what to hold on to and what to throw out the airlock.

Thus, there are safe deposit boxes and save rooms (complete with chiming piano), but no ink ribbons or other time-limited save items (though I wouldn’t object to a harder mode that included these). Elster can move in any direction with ease, and there is even a tank control mode for those who truly enjoy being a self-hating idiot. You can choose between automatic and free aim when using a gun. Due to the lack of a stamina metre, Elster can continue to run indefinitely, albeit with an increasingly noticeable limp and stagger as damage increases. Also, the maps are excellent. Each door has a unique code that indicates whether it has been used, is broken, or requires keys; doors that have not yet been explored appear greyed out. All of this greatly aids navigation without completely revealing any secrets, unlike the slightly too transparent “You’ve got all the things already” indicator in Resi 2 Remake. The descriptions of items can also be relied upon, as they will typically inform you of the exact level on which the room to which a key grants access can be found.

Staying faithful to the classics doesn’t mean Signalis has no fresh twists, though. Elster discovers a radio early on; this discovery serves as the impetus for a number of interesting puzzles and story beats, as well as some spooky stuff I won’t spoil. As soon as things become routine, the unexpected happens, like the final lockbox in a series of keys and locations turning out to contain not the final keycard but an eldritch portal to somewhere…else. It’s also not a campy film at all, instead favouring a gritty, unsettling atmosphere and heavy emotional turmoil.

For some reason, Signalis still enjoys snacking on cheese. You’ll get the message “You’ll regret this later” if you close a console without saving. However, it replaces stately manors with cold war concrete, writhing meat upholstery, and emotional turmoil. In these respects, it’s much more on par with Silent Hill 2.

You can also find some excellent puzzles here. You shouldn’t stop at just collecting items; you should also read them all. I made notes of it all, writing some horrible eldritch shit on a missed delivery card and then laughing to myself as I pictured having to hand it in to the receptionist at the main post office, who would surely be completely perplexed. If you’re not a fan of survival horror, you can still enjoy Signalis as an atmospheric puzzler with an interesting look and story by waiting for the inventory patch and lowering the game’s difficulty. Lots of buttons and screens to interact with bring back the adventure game feel of the days before Resi. The plot of Alone in the Dark would be similar if Edward Carnby had abandoned his academic career, shaved off his moustache, and joined an interstellar forever war as a hot android.

In my opinion, the lack of enemy variety and, more generally, the absence of panic-ridden set pieces is what really holds Signalis back from (I’m going to say it, hold on to your faces) perfection. There are unquestionably times when Adverse Events occur Where They Never Occurred Before. It even borrows Resi 1 Remake/The Evil Within’s corpse burning – dead uns’ can spring back to life if you don’t use a limited item to incinerate them, making every walk past a previously defeated enemy tense. The weapons are chunky, especially the shotgun. One can use a flare gun as a weapon of mass destruction. Instead of knives, you use tasers, which is how nu-Resi sees it. You can stealth past enemies. You can tell it’s time to be stealthy because there’s a propaganda poster warning against the perils of running through the halls. Adore it. Fewer still are the Dog Corridors, where previously unseen foes suddenly materialise in a confined space and you have no idea what they’re capable of doing. You may be debating whether to fight back or run away to a safe place. Very much to my liking. Almost never, Signalis does that.

I’ve finished making a fuss. Please enjoy this much more pleasant sound: Songtrack from the game Signalis. Modified tuning for classical piano. Frightening percussion alerts. Audio glitches that seem to have been designed by someone whose worst nightmares revolve around broken modems from the 1990s. It’s filled with music that elevates emptiness to loneliness, loneliness to horror, and horror to tragedy. The visual noise is just as chaotic and retrofuturistic as the audio. The game has more than a whiff of a more subdued Hideo Kojima, from its themes to its codec-like puzzles to its visual trickery. A Kojima who prefers to operate covertly and cause minimal disruption, for example. Fourth wall breaks that take the other three, the roof, and the ceiling with them, but do it smooth and silent as a tablecloth trick. In order to create an accurate representation of Elster’s world, you must decide which signals to ignore and which to incorporate into your filter.

In the first hour of Signalis, you’ll first open a copy of The King in Yellow, so it’s no surprise that the film’s horror writhes on a cosmic as well as a psychological level. It uses the vast sense of mystery characteristic of cosmic horror without any of the nihilism typically associated with the subgenre, but does so in a subtle and pernicious way. The horror and tragedy of Signalis are all the more impactful because the reader knows that Elster actually experienced something beautiful and real.

When I finally pieced together what was going on, I felt fulfilled; however, I was also completely prepared to watch a one-hour video essay to fill in the gaps. Even if you don’t understand the meaning, poems like Signalis can make you feel something because of the way they texture language, ideas, and images. Signalis is a must-play if you’re a fan of the survival horror genre, queer android love stories, the aesthetics of cold war paranoia, retrofuturism, or cosmic horror when people who aren’t Lovecraft do far more interesting things with it.