Signalis

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.

A retro pixel-art action survival game with puzzle elements, Signalis checks a lot of boxes for things I enjoy. Weird Cosmic Horror? Check. Retro-scifi setting? Check. Creepy enemies that you can barely fight? Check. There were some better-than-average puzzles which required a bit more thinking than usual which was much appreciated, including a lock picking puzzle which required you to know the fundamentals of how locking picking works to solve it.

Some of the puzzles however were completely inscrutable. There is a puzzle lock which you are meant to match against an orrery, which, even knowing that one is supposed to use the orrery, I couldn’t solve without looking up the solution online. There is another tarot card puzzle which you are supposed to use a characters diary entry to solve, which is a stretch, considering there are dozens of other diaries, so the diary you are supposed to use seems like just any other diary in the game.

At different movements, the game switches from a switched 3^rd person perspective to a first person perspective, which is something I have not seen before. But for many of those scenes, the key thing you are doing is reading text blocks, which I found started to get tiring. I ended up wishing that I could skip through the first person scenes.

There is a complex story which I won’t really get into (others have tried to grapple with the nuances with far more success). I found that with the low-res pixilation, a lot of the subtle distinctions which others picked up on between different characters and settings were lost on me.

In the end, a lot of the narrative elements I found derivative or misguided. The game has a “false ending” about half-way through, reminiscent of the false ending in Batman: Arkham Asylum. But this false ending is far too subtle; unlike in Arkham Asylum, where the whole loading screen becomes Joker themed and the player definitely knows something is going on, in Signalis the only indication that you may have more game play ahead of you is that the “eye” behind the main menu selection has changed slightly. When you click on any option, you start the game again, which is confusing. I thought that when I hit quit I had mistakenly hit restart, as the area your character starts in at the beginning of the game is the same as the area your character starts in after the false ending. I only realized I had encountered a false ending after I Googled “Signalis ending” to try to figure out what the heck was going. I’m not the only one who this happened to, as another reviewer had the exact same experience.

Some of the most provocative imagery was taken straight from other media. The scene right before the false ending where Elster rips her own robot arms off trying to open the hatch of the Penrose is extremely similar to the scene in Ghost in the Shell where Major rips her arm and leg off trying to open the hatch of the spider tank.

I ended up “fighting” with my characters limited inventory capacity more than with anything else. I would often have to micromanage inventory to try to do anything, running back and forth from my storage box to try to juggle having guns, healing items, and mission critical items. The game took about 16 hours to finish for the “Death” ending, and I’ll bet 4 hours of that was spent just managing inventory. In the final boss battle, the biggest challenge is remembering which type of ammo drops at which points, making sure you have just those weapons and those weapons only in your inventory, and then making sure you have an empty inventory slot to pick up the “spears” you need to finish off the boss after each round, a mechanic which is only introduced in that one boss fight and probably should have been utilized at least one before so it isn’t a novel mechanic by the end.

I liked the use of Elster’s radio module as a way to get clues and solve puzzles, the use of memories stored in her memory, the novel-if-meaningless-“health” screen, the art style, the sound, and the music. I’ve read that the dev team was aiming more for a felt experience that was dream-like then a coherent story, and if so, they achieved it. But I found myself wishing that things weren’t so nonsensical. Given all the elements the dev team created (a wonderful sci-fi space ship, a rich set of lore, a fun and challenging fighting system, some great puzzles), a “rescue the princess” narrative would still have worked and could still end in tragedy. The idea of two lovers alone on a space-ship slowly dying without finding a place to land is a wonderful tragic image, but having that be the “real” story as to what occurred and having the rest of the game be a “dream” I found unsatisfying.