Signalis is the mind-melting indie darling born from the marriage of Resident Evil's gameplay and the surreal, melancholic psychological horror of Silent Hill, cradled in a retrofuturistic sci-fi setting where CRT monitors and artificial humans with existential crises are commonplace.
Among the dozens of mediocre copies of the influences that make up the game—and despite the very apparent limitations of its tiny budget—Signalis, with visuals reminiscent of the Nintendo DS games, at least manages to bring a strong sense of style and a presentation mature enough to stand out naturally among its peers, even without betting on innovation or subverting clichés.
I won't say it's an indispensable modern classic and, without a doubt, it's a rather flawed game whose gameplay doesn't go much beyond a serviceable—less than competent—replication of a formula established by old games, but for someone who usually despises the creatively lazy clones the indie scene churns out in industrial quantities, Signalis surprised me enough that I bought it twice.
The game is an immersive surrealist nightmare, built upon solid foundations and carried by a gripping atmosphere. It's a strange, brutalist, depressing journey that leaves a strong lasting impression.
It is fair to say that the highlight of the experience is the narrative. More than the story itself, its cryptic presentation—filled with disconnected montages referencing things you'll have to look up outside the game, distorted jumps through time that create a powerful sense of disorientation, and esoteric, existential metaphors that will probably fly right over your head—juxtaposed against the cold, bleak realism of its totalitarian setting, effectively evokes a feeling of stepping away from the mundane and plunging into the unknown, toward the abyss of a decaying mind.
I know this kind of story is catnip for humans. Especially for those chronically online weebs who obsessively dissect every tiny detail of a deliberately vague work. But I've long since moved past this phase, and nowadays i'm content simply experiencing them, following the guidance of the late David Lynch.
Which allows me to say that I have absolutely no idea what the story is actually about, yet I liked it a great deal. It's the pleasure of uncertainty that keeps the story alive and emotionally resonant. It's one hell of a mind trip.
Besides, if there's one thing that can save a story, it's telling it like this. If you can't be straightforward, turn it into a puzzle. Nobody will understand it, everyone will call it "genius and complex". By the time they figure it out, you'll already be long gone counting your money.
I'm kidding, of course. The remarkable competence with which Signalis handles its surrealism makes it obvious that a great deal of thought went into everything you're seeing. That's what separates it from the rest.
Then we have the gameplay... which is the weakest aspect of the package.
Even if it's good enough to create enough friction through disempowerment to generate tension and encourage strategic decision-making, it's still a pale, unpolished reproduction of the RE formula, without introducing a single new idea or making any meaningful attempt to refine what came before.
Although the game does a proper job of establishing an immersive sense of place, contextualizing each room, hallway and puzzle (mostly good, btw) in a believable way and connecting everything through smooth shortcuts spread across the environments, the whole thing suffers from rather bland characterization and an overwhelming sense of predictability.
The level design brings nothing particularly creative to the table, and its layouts are far too flat for my taste, but what stands out to me the most is just how easy it is to predict what you'll find simply by looking at the map.
If you compare it to a classic Resident Evil—the mansion, for example—you'll notice that the maps of both games are actually quite similar, full of neatly interconnected rectangles and squares. The crucial difference is that, in RE, seeing a place in person is a completely different experience from seeing it on the map. A square or rectangle there can represent rooms and hallways that are radically different from one another, each with their own nuances and touches of environmental storytelling, made even richer by the placement of important items.
If a game can make you remember specific locations—specific things of specific locations—that's simply the mark of excellent level design and art direction. It's also something many RE-inspired games, or titles built around a similar design philosophy, managed to reproduce.
In Signalis, however, a square or rectangle almost always ends up being exactly that once you get there, with dull environments devoid of personality and completely forgettable. Remembering any specific location in the game—even if you walked through it just a few minutes ago—is practically impossible, given how repetitive and generic most of its areas are.
They go to great lengths trying to establish the setting in a believable way and maintain internal consistency, but end up producing something sterile and drowsy to navigate and backtrack through, a world that hardly ever subverts the mundane until almost the very end of the experience—which, frankly, only culminates in the same old thing anyway.
You can't say it doesn't fit the game's understated and irreverent tone, and admittedly a lot is lost because of the decision to use an isometric camera instead of carefully directed cinematic angles designed to maximize the intended effect. Still, I don't think that excuses the uninspired visuals. It makes the game feel far less interesting, boringly predictable, intriguing purely because of the surrealism of its narrative while making the gameplay itself feel like little more than a bureaucratic procedure instead of something genuinely engaging. The fundamentals are solid, but the execution is merely functional. They clearly needed to push much further if this game was ever going to stand alongside the classics that inspired it.
The game doesn't seem to have been tested particularly well either. On Survival difficulty, it starves you of ammunition to such an extent that playing tactically and methodically to preserve your resources simply isn't enough. Unless you've already memorized the entire game—knowing the location of every item, puzzle piece, and enemy—it turns into a glorified walking simulator, because you'll barely get to engage with its mechanics in any meaningful way.
Nothing is more satisfying than finally finding an ammo box—which is already a rare occurrence—only for it to contain one or two bullets. It wasn't that the game was punishing me for making bad decisions; it was that I almost never got to make any decisions at all besides running.
Capitalizing on having conserved my more valuable ammunition never really happened, because handgun ammo was almost as scarce as shotgun shells. By the end, when the game starts relying heavily on narrow corridors packed with enemies that force you into combat, the problem becomes even more apparent.
That's without even mentioning the constant backtracking, the inventory that never expands (perhaps because of some symbolism surrounding the number six), the very limited enemy variety, the terrible aiming controls and the many,many mechanical ideas that remain underutilized.
But... I'll have to stop here because I've already blown past the word limit.
Signalis is a good game. Flawed, uneven in terms of quality, but still a worthwhile and memorable experience.
