I've been properly ill with something that had all of the tell tale signs of COVID this week but no matter how many times I pushed testing sticks up my nose, apparently wasn't COVID. I think this probably means I don't know how to use the tests properly. ANYWAY, I had to squeeze something a bit simpler out due to spending most of the last few days sleeping and a pretty straightforward review is something I can knock out while I'm barely functional at this point, so enjoy some words about Signalis.

Dear Elster

I find myself bouncing off a lot of modern horror games. You've got the post-Amnesia, post-P.T. first person hide 'em ups that leave me extremely cold. There's the "jump scares with an extremely cool aesthetic" lot like the stuff pumped out by Puppet Combo which do little for me and then there's a stack of modern remakes of classic survival horror games that, although good games in their own right, are detached from most of the stuff that made me love the original games in the first place, like the Resident Evil 2/3 remakes. I love those classic survival horror titles - the fixed camera, tank controls, limited inventory space, ammo and resource management, puzzle solving and one single area that you slowly open up as you explore and make your way further into the game. Everything from Resident Evil to Silent Hill to Alone In The Dark, to even stuff like Deep Fear, Carrier and Cold Fear (the nautical trilogy, as I like to call them). There's something about the slow pace and satisfaction I get from exploration and progression that I find lacking in a lot of recent titles and man, I miss it.

Signalis harks back to these classic titles, specifically the first Silent Hill game. It's a puzzle heavy survival horror title that ticks almost all of the boxes I mentioned above. A sci-fi horror, you play as Elster, a cyborg who wakes up from cryosleep on a crashed space ship, looking for a woman. Who is this woman? A sister? A colleague? A lover or an enemy? Much like a lot of things in Signalis, the reality of this situation is kept intentionally vague. I'm going to keep this pretty much spoiler-free so I won't be getting into plot specifics but honestly, there's a whole lot of Signalis I couldn't spoil in the first place because I have no idea what was going on. After this short intro, there's a flash cut and you're in a mineral mining outpost called the Sierpinski Station, which is where the bulk of the game takes place. Predictably, it's all gone South there, with bodies scattered all over the shop, some of which will get up and start wandering around, appearing to be rotten and diseased. There's no big information dump or backstory to this place or what happened, instead the world of Signalis is fleshed out through more organic things like personal logs and posters on the walls, that paint an image of a world with a totalitarian government, a war taking/has taken place and a society which has a mixture of Gestalt (essentially humans) and Replika (the cyborgs), existing together, whilst Sierpinski Station appears to have fallen foul of some virus that slowly took hold of the workers. I think. Whether this is set before or after the events in the intro, or whether any of this is even real, is left unclear.

What is clear is the influences Signalis wears on its sleeve. As mentioned above, the first Silent Hill game is the biggest touchpoint. It's VERY puzzle heavy and the horror comes from building an oppressive atmosphere instead of 'cheap' jump scares. Combat is slow and methodical and, although it offers you everything you need to survive, feels clunky and restrictive enough to ensure you're rarely overpowered and every encounter with an enemy could end with you taking a lot of damage and multiple enemies are a real nightmare scenario. There's some simplistic stealth elements, as you can sometimes avoid an encounter by walking through a corridor rather than running and staying out of line of sight of one of the enemies - alerting one causes them to let out a piercing scream and attract the attention of everything to your presence, so it can feel quite tense when you're trying to sneak around, despite being fairly basic.

There's save rooms with some soothing music (the whole soundtrack is excellent, too) item boxes that magically transport all their contents between each other, ammo and health resource management, limited inventory space that you can populate with items that all have lovely rotating 3D models of themselves to examine - all elements, no matter how small and seemingly inconsequential - of classic survival horror. By the end of the game, my own reluctance to use high end health packs and ammunition for the best weapons ensured that I had a platoon's worth of firepower to unleash on the final boss - a true trait of the genre! A more unique feature for a survival horror title is the inclusion of a radio scanner built into the menu, allowing you to scan through the frequencies and see if you can pick anything up. Sometimes you just get a creepy repeating series of numbers in German but there's quite a few puzzles attached to finding a correct frequency and using your findings from that to solve it. There's even an enemy who broadcasts a noise that causes the screen to distort but if you can find this noise on your radio you can cause a feedback loop, stunning the enemy and allowing you to finish them off. Rad.

The structure is fairly simple. There's no major backtracking like Resident Evil, instead the game is split up into self-contained 'floors', each one acting like its own tiny version of say, the Arklay Mansion. There's usually one major puzzle that needs to be solved in order to proceed and, to do this, you need to get items and information from a series of smaller scale puzzles dotted around the floor. There's a bit of flexibility in how you go about tackling these too and the main overarching puzzle tends to require a bit of logical thinking as to how to use the parts/items gained from the smaller puzzles and they all tread the line of being challenging enough to require some real thought and being easy enough that I - an idiot - could solve them and feel big, clever and smart. I had to bust out the pen and paper and ended up making four pages of notes and scrawled diagrams during my playthrough and that is always a good sign as far as I'm concerned. Apparently Signalis started life as pretty much a point and click adventure and it really, really shows.

Above everything, the puzzles and the strong survival horror influence, the main strength of Signalis is the way it weaves an atmosphere that keeps you constantly unsettled but utterly invested - you don't want to see what's around the next corner but at the same time, you absolutely HAVE to see what is next. There's a sense of isolation and a creeping dread that everything is - somehow - going to get even worse than it already is. Modern 'creepypasta' staples like numbers stations and haunted broadcasts are a big influence. There's a lot of well-worn sci-fi tropes about Existentialism, identity, humanity, transhumanism and the like that weave around some elements of Cronenberg-esque body horror that mix together nicely with the overall aesthetic and somehow come out feeling fairly fresh and unique takes on the subject matters, certainly within the survival horror genre. There's an ongoing theme of loneliness, of being cut off from everything - both figurative and literally - which resonates extra hard post-pandemic. The game has been in development in some way since around 2016, but I do wonder how much the past two years shaped this aspect of the narrative.

The only real negatives I found were that there's a fair bit of repetition, not only in the structure of each floor but there's a few puzzles reused with a slight spin, but not enough of a spin to make them interesting a second or even third time around. The main issue I had is with some of the presentation. Although largely very good, there's a few close up sequences of the characters drawn in this anime style that veers a bit too close to Deviant Art "how to draw your first anime characters" Westerner fan drawing for my tastes. I'm not the biggest fan of the anime aesthetic in the first place but here it comes across as very unauthentic and the only real area where the influences fall a bit flat.

Signalis manages to mix together a lot of strong influences but manages to keep an identity of its own, with these elements from similar games and other media feeling like tributes rather than shameless rip-offs. It serves as a reminder that, despite what the current trends in gaming will tell you, no genre is truly dead when a smart developer with good ideas can frame classic mechanics in a fresh and interesting way. If you're still looking for something to scratch a particular horror itch after Halloween or just looking to play one of the better games released in 2022, I give this a strong recommendation.

THANKS FOR READING.

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