SIGNALIS - Devastatingly Sad

The Price : £14.39 (on sale) The Total Play Time : 9.5hr (achieved 9/13 achievements, Memory)

The Review :

Excellent and bespoke, SIGNALIS offers an unmatched horror experience, both in design and execution.

At first, it was a struggle to complement the high concept story with the low level gameplay. As if the depth of the story far exceeded that of the tools it provided. I was drowning. In time however, I stopped thrashing, slowly learning to float, dreamlike, in the cold and lonely ocean. SIGNALIS is that lonely ocean. Lonely, and empty. And in a game so expertly crafted, so exceptionally well made, machine cut with a mirror sheen, such emptiness can only be a genuine decision. A decision so honest as to accentuate your isolation. As more of the lore is revealed to you, cryptic and fragmented, the gap between all its elements slowly bridge until the final pieces are in place and you understand. A gut punch that left me winded. For as brutal and cruel as it was: sadistic environments, horrific enemies, graphic cut scenes, cripplingly limited inventory, bizarre and nightmarish puzzles, the ending of the game was very quiet. An ending that firmly cements the game as a love story. If it were not a love story, it could not move you like it does. And it does.

You, a Replika unit, a copy of a faded template, and your captain, a Gestalt (human), pilot the ship Penrose-512. Your years-long mission is to find new planets and resources for the Eusan Nation, a vast but crippled totalitarian regime that reeks of cold war austerity. The ship becomes stranded on an icy wasteland and your captain is missing. You leave the ship and trudge through the snow until you find an entrance to a sheltered dilapidated government facility. From here the game pulls logic out from under you, leaving you to fall into the nightmare that is the rest of the game. You learn tidbits that enlighten your view of the other characters and yourself, and that constantly recontextualise the story for you as you play. This continues right until the very end; the game tries hard to make you understand everything is subjective and that the takeaways are only what you can readily grasp.

Visually, the game is unique and varied. There is a strong, fuzzy, VHS / CRT filter to everything, making you feel as if it were all happening a long time ago or in a not quite lucid present. The 3D models with a compressed pixel art aspect ratio lend themselves perfectly to this style while still allowing for smooth animations with tight controls. Not too tight however, as is traditional in horror. During regular gameplay you are also subjected to harsh sounds and visuals, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks both violent and disturbed. These assaults rapidly increase as you near the end, your mind eroding in front of you. A lot of the game is written in a mix of different languages too, mainly German and Chinese, populating everything: notes, posters, signs, flashbacks, even nightmares. While I understand a little German, the use of multiple languages further defies you from inferring any real meaning, forcing you to rely heavily on your emotional responses to all the game's stimuli. So much so that there was even a direct quoting of the long term nuclear waste warning, a message designed to convey fear and disgust solely through emotive language.

This place is not a place of honour... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

SIGNALIS also employs a beautiful and oddly serene soundtrack that, meshed with the horror of the environment and enemies, lulls you into a trancelike state compelling you to stay in areas you otherwise wouldn’t purely to continue listening. Diegetically the game makes heavy use of a radio component installed in your body, allowing you to listen to enigmatic number readouts, further drawing you in but denying you any close inspection. The numbers are even read out in German. Perhaps my favourite area was when a radio frequency picked up Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and I roamed around the hallways dodging hellish mobs as if part of some morbid ballet myself.

While the game is short and over relatively quickly, the gameplay is slow, methodical, and succinct. Each area is well contained with novel features introduced throughout. Even included some superb standalone set pieces, like fully 3D first person sections. Interesting puzzles mixed with great enemies and thoroughly designed levels carry much of your playtime. The puzzles initially feel very obscure if not mechanically familiar, but as the game progresses and you become more aware of the themes, all of it begins to intertwine very well. While the game can be difficult at times, juggling meagre resources with meagre weapons in a meagre inventory system, I often felt more emphasis was on solving the puzzles than outright mechanical gameplay. Though I completely understand this, I personally felt like the 3D system the game had implemented was underutilised, and had the capacity to be expanded. Expanded meaningfully, however? I do not know. Perhaps in a different context such an option could be explored, but for what it is, it’s perfect.

I fear this review is too short, and fails to encroach on some of the deeper conversations the game has to offer, but I know to do so would be to spoil the journey. In a game designed to be so personal too, it would be a shame to have too much bias going in. As such, this has to be where it ends. I am sorry.