Perhaps I should state in advance my prejudices about signalis overview: there was not the slightest chance that I would not like Signalis. I'm a long time survival horror fan and this is an old school survival horror game. If you ever hear the question of who this game was made for, tell me what it was for me.
However, this is not at all what I expected. The trailers and the demo at PAX West that I played in September make it seem like Signalis is just a straightforward homage to late '90s survival horror games like Them and Us or Tormented Souls.
That's a good description of Signalis in 25 words, but it doesn't tell the whole story. There is a deliberate surrealism to the game's story that has been haunting me for weeks now. The deeper you get into Signalis, the more it feels like the game is unfolding around you, going from a sci-fi story to someone else's disturbing dream.
Signalis takes place in the distant future, in a solar system controlled by the authoritarian Yuzan Republic. You play as LSTR-512, or "Elster", a technician on the USS Penrose on a mission to find habitable planets. Elster is also a Replica: an artificial human who was created and programmed to do his job without much capacity for personal initiative.
At the beginning of the game, Elster awakens to find that the Penrose ship has crashed on an ice-covered planetoid at the edge of the system. Her only crew member, the ship's pilot, went missing. Elster, in order to fulfill the promise she made to the pilot, goes in search of him.
The nearest settlement on the planetoid is a mining colony, and Elster quickly discovers that it only appears abandoned. A strange disease broke out here, affecting people and turning most of the local Replicas into monsters.
I'm deliberately omitting a few key details of the Signalis plot. I know that at least some of this information is already in the previews on other sites, but I was able to enter the game almost completely cold and benefited a lot from it. It's worth doing it yourself if you have the opportunity.
With that said, if you're a fan of classic horror, you'll have a solid grasp of what's going on in Signalis as early as the first 15 minutes or by the end of the demo. I would even say that you will have an advantage over the game, since some parts of its plot are only explained through cultural references.
(Signalis also has a fun Eternal Darkness twist around the second third of the playthrough. You'll know it when you see it. You'll also be able to tell when someone buys into it, because they're more likely to be mad about it on Twitter. or reddit).
As Elster, you set out to explore a mining colony in search of weapons, answers, and a missing crew member, despite the fact that corrupted Replicas inhabit most of the territory and will attack you at any moment.
Signalis features a fairly conventional array of weapons: a pistol, a shotgun, and an SMG, with a small amount of ammo for each. It's often possible to slip past enemies without a fight or take them out with a few well-aimed bullets, but most of the enemies in Signalis don't stay dead.
If you don't incinerate a corrupted Replica with a flare, it will eventually resurrect, and there aren't that many flares in the game. You will have to carefully choose where and when to shoot, and not just destroy all the enemies in your path.
Elster, in the literal sense of the word, is not intended for combat. She is a programmed technician who operates far beyond her operating parameters, which mechanically translates into an awkward aiming system. It's easy enough to use, but Elster is slow to raise and level his weapon, especially if you're trying to quickly aim at something that just appeared behind you.
Additionally, it has 6 inventory slots that can hold anything you want to carry with you, including quest items and necessary equipment. In-universe, this is due to the fact that Elster is a replica, so she is programmed to only be able to take a certain amount of equipment with her at any given time. The Yuzan Republic considers Replicas to be more replaceable than bullets.
Signalis co-developer Yuri Stern called it "oppressive systems and old school survival horror mechanics." In-universe, this is essentially a condemnation of the Yuzan Republic, which sees great value in treating both humans and Replicas as cogs in a machine. In both the Signalis setting and its genre, the deck is obviously stacked against you from the very beginning.
The colony itself is steadily falling apart, and it has been so since before your arrival. At the very beginning, you will have to solve some puzzles that take the form of a mechanical failure, such as reconnecting the power supply.
After a certain point, the puzzles start to slowly get weird, which is also the point where the Signalis starts to literally and figuratively fall apart. The deeper Elster sinks into the colony, the further she strays from reality, until the puzzles deliberately stop making any sense on any level other than the logic of the dream.
This is an interesting general approach. Most modern games choose to omit combat entirely rather than making it deliberately awkward; give a couple of bonuses to the quality of life, like a special inventory for quest items; and often, if not necessarily, try to fit the puzzles organically into the setting. Signalis, on the other hand, is actively trying to disappoint and confuse the player. If this is the deciding factor for you, I can't blame you.
It's also not entirely efficient, especially in the second half of the Signalis review, where the game's difficulty ramps up dramatically. The game map goes offline for a while, the fights get a lot harder without warning, and you get thrown into several big fights without warning. You get a better weapon, but Elster still wields it, so it ends up highlighting the worst aspects of the game system.
Inventory management also becomes a major issue in the latest major Signalis zone, where you have to juggle more quest items at once than ever before. I don't know if I missed some backpack upgrade for Elster, but I've spent most of the last two hours of the game making relay races to the nearest storage container. At this point, as interesting as the parallels between the setting and mechanics of Signalis were, I started to get annoyed.
However, having completed the game, I have to admit that these are just nitpicks. The real reason to review Signalis is that it is unlike anything else. This is not a nostalgic project or painstaking recreation of its designers' favorite games; instead, the game uses the limited gameplay mechanics of the previous generation to reflect the overwhelm and panic of its characters.
Signalis is more unsettling and creepy than terrifying, but if you're looking for a short, intense game for a Halloween weekend, look no further.
