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I have a lot of words about Signalis and I love the game a lot. So let's talk about it. I want to know if you've played it, if you want to play it or are going to, how you feel during or after playing it, your favorite replika, etc. TO get us off to a good start, heres all my thoughts after finishing it yesterday night.

// entry
I finished Signalis yesterday. I think to say that I only liked it would undersell the fat spool of good things I have to say about it. When it ended, it made me want to cry. And my thoughts are unraveling after being wound up tight by how good this game is. The experience made me feel a lot of things, and it’s a very emotional game. I feel like it is hard to spoil this unless you’re a real obsessive over literal events. There are obvious landmarks but nothing feels integrally tied to the details like which character shot first. So I suppose this will be a spoiler-free OP?

Signalis is a very pure experience. To me it is like rose-engine extracted what makes a survival horror game as a powder in a lab and used it as a base coat. with all the faults that has? yeah, anecdotally a lot of people bounce off it in the first five minutes. It doesn’t fix any issues you probably have with the genre. It can feel punishing and be stressful, but that’s the point. It is a genre piece in a sub format of games that has a lot of limits. I implore anyone reading this to stick with the 6 slot inventory limit if you do play it, because it feels integral to the experience. It is thematically relevant. The extent of ones life, all the things you can hold onto, retreading the same ground over and over … it wouldn’t hit the same if you just turned off that looming tentacle of the emotional core of the whole game.

Instead of doing the busy work of trying to fix the faults in the basic design of a survival horror game, making it a more modern experience, Signalis stays primitive. and instead, it goes on excursions and it speaks in tongues and gestures at a lot more than it outright says. it is confusing and obtuse. theres room to imagine and speculate and dread and feel alone and sad and wonder about whats going to happen next. it is an addictive feeling to be allowed to breathe.

A lot of what makes it for me is about presentation and sequence. The way it reveals information and in what order feels more important to me than the particulars, because I think, keeping all this stuff in your head, jugging all that stuff in your inventory, it hangs together. It is obviously intentional. It gives you this negative space where you’re marching around these steel corridors, thinking about what you know so far. There are these conflicting, overlapping pieces of information. Sometimes they even eat each other. It is bizarre to experience in real time.

To my eye it’s better executed and more thoughtful than a typical horror game riffing on silent hill, too. What I feel that most gather from silent hill is that theres all this stuff in this place and some of it is clearly real and some of it is clearly not but its all rotten to the core. Thats weak as hell on its own. if theres no good taste in camera work or spice in the writing or even just weird little nuggets, little choices or details made about how things are, it falls down and doesnt work very well. In signalis they were careful. theres LOTS of spice. just in the cutscenes alone, they are beautiful and stark and linger in the right way, locked down, like little paintings. and the love thats there, the care, makes the feeling of fuzziness present and relevant. The delineation between reality and unreality isn’t clear, the line between past and present isn’t clear, how it plays with the whole idea feels fresh. if they were either more vague or explained more it would be far weaker, they just nailed it.

Thats how i feel about the game as a whole. They just fucking nailed it, for me anyway.

// end

Let me know how you feel. see you soon.

Survival horror is, to me, a frustrating genre. So much of it is cheap, built on the backs of titles now 20, 30 years old. Many use these old tropes and mechanics to evoke feelings of nostalgia, without really understanding why they were used originally. Features are imported wholesale, given a fresh coat of paint, but their antecedents were born out of hardware limitations that no longer exist. What new innovations we get, through titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Alien: Isolation, P.T. (all of those over a decade old, yeesh) are quickly copied.

Signalis does not reinvent survival horror. It is not this great breath of fresh air, totally innovative and new. It is steeped in the past; Resident Evil by way of mechanics, Silent Hill by way of aesthetic. But it is, as you said, pure. It does not aim to reinvent the genre, because it is perhaps the purest expression *of* it. The only game I can think of, off the top of my head, with a similar vibe is Silent Hill 2. Oft praised, endlessly copied, but Signalis is perhaps the first game since its release over two decades ago that truly iterates on its theme.

Because Signalis is about grief. Yearning. The self-destructive tendency to reclaim what you've lost, even though it will never be as good as it once was. Even if it was never good to begin with. It is maybe the most emotional game I've ever played. I don't think anything has ever touched me quite like Signalis has. Every single facet of it reinforces this central theme, an unshakeable foundation, an unstoppable cycle.

Yes, Signalis is not a particularly novel game, in terms of its gameplay. The Rule of Six inventory limit is diagetic, but is itself a thin excuse to evoke the limited options of classic Resident Evil.

That it goes to this length, at all, to explain itself is commendable. Most games would list the Resident Evil inventory management as a feature on the store blurb and leave it at that. Signalis goes a little bit further, and the dedication is lovely.

Moving onto the oppressive mood, punishing and stressful. I replayed the game earlier this year for the secret ending (which I highly recommend after clearing the game once normally, though you WILL need a guide), and decided to play on the hardest difficulty.

It was pretty hard! I died constantly, I scrounged for supplies and ran past Replikas in ways I'd never had to in other games. Many times I thought of just giving up and restarting on normal, because I'd never had this much trouble on that difficulty.

Then, as I blundered around Nowhere (the Otherworld body horror segment of the game, connecting the Sierpinski and Vineta arcs), I realized something.

This was what it was like for Elster, wasn't it? This was an echo of her own struggle, endlessly trying to return to Ariane, to fulfill her promise against impossible odds. Every repair kit, every bullet, was essential, not to be wasted. Elster spent most of that run hurt, clutching her side, vision glitching and fading at the edges, but still she pressed on. Still I strove to give her the ending we both so desperately wanted.

It's rare that a game can put me in the mindset of its central characters. Through the hardship, I understood what it was to be her, lonely and forlorn, a wraith haunting a ruined star system. A lost, forgotten yearning her only solace. It's incredibly sad. I'm tearing up writing this, thinking of her, of those halcyon days on the Penrose-512, before it all went bad.

That later segment, when you read the message the Nation sent on Cycle 3000, when you learn that everything, this entire game, was built on a cruel lie. The second time through, I didn't feel the shock Elster and Ariane did, as I did the first playthrough. I felt anger, hatred at this fictional nation, and how strange that was.

So much of this setting is fascinating to me. I *adore* the Replikas, their designs, how the game hints that, while every Replika of a particular make stems from the same Gestalt neural pattern, not every Replika is the same. They're all variations on a theme. LSTRs are all taciturn and introverted, but none of them are like Elster-512. It's hard for me to pick a favorite, I love them all dearly. FKLRs are perhaps the most aesthetically-appealing to me, but Elster's my favorite.

When you start the game, when you see her as she boots up. Her face is neutral, calm, but so very, very tired. Every part of her is grief, but she'll keep doing this over and over, forever.

Lest we also forget, the STAR/EULR couple seen a couple times in the game are beautifully tragic. I adore them.

It's stated in ADLR's journal that the setting is steeped in an endless cycle, that everything repeats. The normal endings you get (my first playthrough resulted in the Promise ending) is merely the end of one cycle, only for another to start when you start a new file. It's remarkably bleak, but again, there's your diagesis. Arguably the secret ending is the only one to break the cycle, and is by far the most ambiguous one. That it requires outside knowledge of the game, I believe people only discovered it through datamining and hints from the devs, speaks again to diagesis. It just keeps happening!

And, yes, so much of Signalis is steeped in metaphor, layers and layers to pick apart. Every first-person segment, every quick flash of text, standing on an otherworldly beach, staring up at a black void of a sky. That, at the very beginning of the game, you crawl through a hole to reach a lonely, cramped radio room, and begin the game pulling a book off the shelf. Chambers' The King in Yellow, immediately setting the vibe that we're gonna get into some weird cosmic horror shit.

There's so much to pick apart here. People *have* picked it apart, the wiki is a lovely resource, as is the Discord. There's musing on repeating cycles of grief, non-Euclidean reality warping, that Ariane is a reincarnation of the presumed-dead Grand Empress, once ruler of humanity. Bioresonance leading into a signal of grief and rage and love throughout the stars, Ariane's pod as a chrysalis for a greater form of existence. I fucking love this kind of analysis, and Signalis has wrapped me around itself so deeply that I can't help but immerse myself in it.

On that note, arainydancer's shorts are required watching: https://www.youtube.com/@arainydancer

If you're of a fanfic inclination, here are some of my favorites. Some of these are some of the most beautiful stories I've ever read, even apart from fanfic.

Die Malerin
Spider//Lily
52/60 (very NSFW)
Make it Last Forever

These next two are intended as a sequel to the secret ending, so you might want to look at that first before reading. They're also in a mini-continuity with "Die Malerin" above.

The Herald and Her Knight
The Knight Errant (Sequel to Herald)

I haven't started this one yet, but I hear it's also highly regarded:
A Waltz for the Void

thanks for the fanfic recs i appreciate it.

valera wrote:

Signalis is about grief. Yearning. The self-destructive tendency to reclaim what you've lost, even though it will never be as good as it once was. Even if it was never good to begin with. It is maybe the most emotional game I've ever played.

[...]

This was what it was like for Elster, wasn't it? This was an echo of her own struggle, endlessly trying to return to Ariane, to fulfill her promise against impossible odds. [...] It's rare that a game can put me in the mindset of its central characters.

this is an underanalyzed aspect of this game. for every which way people harp on cycles its like nobody is picking on the other obvious thing thats happening, that these characters are being infected by eachothers thoughts. bioresonance is talked about everywhere, there are replikas specifically for keeping the collective unconscious in check, but its all fucked up, and everyone is free to think and sympathetically affect eachother, and are getting forced into these shapes.

the operational lifetimes of the units are tightly controlled so they dont diverge too much, since they are all copies of specific individuals at different times. Elster is not LSTR-512, at least to begin with, and isnt the LSTR that went down into eternity on sierpenski, but they all overlap and melt together. and Isa is not Alina is not Ariane. But forces from beyond are invading, impressing themselves onto these people two or three or fifty degrees of seperation away and dragging them in closer, denaturing them, like a cancer or a virus.

And it feels apt for how the loss of someone can tear through a community, cuz they all certainly knew eachother, but now they're all melting together. contending with thoughts and memories that arent theirs. but also, this stands well for the repression under the nation, the suppression and disposal of the unique divergent personalities of replikas and peoples and their cultures, churning through machines and men alike as if they were gristle, for wars and work and frivilous suicide missions as pure shows of strength. The state is just as much of an alien force as the empire's literal god-emperor and the insidious cosmic threat.

This pain, bleeding into everyone touched by Ariane, is like a wave. Starting from the central suffering of her and Elster, through Falke touching cosmic horror at the bottom of Sierpenski, to the rest of Leng, then to the Eusan system as a whole.

A psychic scream of pain, rage, boundless and doomed love, corrupting everything it touches. Because the Red Eye, or the King in Yellow, or whatever it truly is, cannot understand it. It is the wave by which Ariane's signal rides, and unfortunately that alien misunderstanding causes the central tragedy of this game.

I'm personally up in the air as to whether the system is entirely ruined, or whether this is all set in some not-space, on some distant planet far away. Is the Vineta segment actually taking place on that dismal moon, or is it a reality reconstructed from Ariane's memories? Both?

The Herald and Her Knight does make a definitive declaration either way, but that's, of course, its own conversation.

It's aight.

Serious answer to come because I have to crash soon but I while I love the aesthetics of this game I didn't feel very interested in the gameplay. I had some plot spoilers beforehand so it definitely ruined the general ambiance of walking around because I got more focused on bigger issue stuff.