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Signalis
Objective: 9
Subjective: 10
It's such an extraordinary, special game that it feel weird to write about it at all. Like, there's so much I could talk about and so many small details I could go into that it feels a bit daunting. But this game is one of the types of art that just reaches deep into your soul and twists your heart, refusing to let go, and the longer time passes, the stronger that feeling. I really do need to talk about it, even if it's to noone.
I first learnt about Signalis when the track 'Cigarette Wife' played on auto while I was jut doing work one day. It's this kinda heavy, industrial loud blaring song that pumps you up. After putting it on loop for about an hour, I looked a bit into the game, and its community. Something about it just pulled me in - sometimes, you just know when you're gonna like something, without looking at anything about it. So on a whim, I bought it to try it out. The genre read 'survival horror', but I figured it would be pretty weak, since the soundtrack was filled with these etherial, dreamy tracks, and the community was full of wholesome memes.
The game is none of those things
What you get instead is one of the most sombre, melancholic stories I've ever seen. It's beautiful in the way that heartbreak can be beautiful. There aren't really any words that I can find that really express the feeling of learning the story and figuring out the background of the characters for the first time. But what I can tell you is that after I finished it, I just lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to process it. It's impressive how big the contrast is between playing the game and after finishing it - playing the game is a miserable, stressful struggle, but looking back on the game, the small, fleeting glimpses of peace and happiness stick with you even more.
I don't even like horror media, but ever since I played this game, I've gone through other survival horror titles trying to reach that same high, but none of them have scratched that itch just yet. Signalis nails that melancholy yearning like the glow between lightrays that I love. It's got a lot of philosophical musings, but never comes of as too full of itself. I highly recommend this to anyone who likes love. Also, it's pretty ironic that a guy named Yuri made a yuri masterpiece.
Gameplay
Just to be clear, it's not scary at all. But man oh man does it weigh down on you. The environments vary between dark, brutalist, languid industrial walls, and pulsating red flesh lumps of cancer. The etherial, dreamy music in the soundtrack will play for maybe 30 seconds, otherwise there's just a constant low droning - unless you're fighting an enemy, in which case music does play. I wouldn't even call it music though, it's just someone banging on the wall and screaming into a microphone. There is no light, no joy to be found in the hellscapes of Signalis. Playing through the game is like trying to walk up a narrow staircase with someone on your back. Yuri and Barbara (the two creators) knocked it out of the park when getting the atmosphere of a survival horror game down. When you're playing the game, you want nothing more than to stop playing just because of how hard it is to keep going.
But world construction aside, the actual gameplay is pretty good. It's your standard survival horror - complete a puzzle to obtain a key, use that key to open a box that has another key, use that key to open a door, which leads to a room containing a puzzle or a piece of readable lore, rinse and repeat. It's the same old gameplay loop that I don't really care for. But the level design is extremely satisfying and well thought out (except the second area). The whole game is played from a topdown perspective, and there's something about the way that Elster walks through doors into the next area that's super satisfying. Movement is also fluid and fast, which can make or break a good videogame. The levels are designed so that you can usually loop around enemies, which lets you walk around and appreciate the aesthetic of the abandoned factory facilities even more.
Combat is nothing surprising either. You collect a range of different types of guns, and point them at enemies to shoot. Of course, being a survival horror game, you get virtually no ammo, so you have to make every shot count by waiting until the last second to shoot enemies, which is extremely stressful if you've got three abominations approaching you from all sides. And of course, don't forget to stomp on them when they're down. Apart from the aim being a bit questionable at times (then again, I was playing on Switch Joycons), the combat's good where it counts. You also get a lot of helper itmes like stun rods, which are by far the most wonderful things in the game, and flares, so that enemies don't respawn.
Something that can be quite controversial, however, is the fact that you can only hold 6 items at a time. Since you'll have at least one weapon, ammo slot, and healing item, that means you'll pretty much only have room for 3 other items, which isn't great if you're trying to open a door that needs 6 keys. Recently, the creators added an update that lets you change the inventory size in the settings, no doubt because way too many people complained about the difficulty. However, I quite liked the 6 item limit. It ment I had to get really creative with how I went about the area, making sure that I bring the right amount of things, because if I messed up and didn't have space to hold one more key, I'd have to go back to the last save point, dump everything in a box, and go back through the horde of enemies just to find some stupid key. But if that limit wasn't there, it wouldn't be much of a 'survival' horror, no? Overall, the whole struggle makes the game feel extremely satisfying when you successfully do something, which is great game design.
This giant wall of text doesn't really nail just how stressful the actual gameplay is. Pushing through mutated cancer robots, having nothing to hear but the screams and clanging industrial noises, crawling across the flesh lumps and blood soaked walls, you start to question if it's really worth it.
But you have a promise to keep, so you keep going.