Signalis: A Love Letter to Survival Horror Greats
It’s difficult to describe just what, exactly, Signalis is other than that it’s an experience like no other.
Released on October 27, 2022, Signalis was developed by two-person team rose-engine and published through Humble Games and Playism. Available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Series S and X, and Playstation 4 and 5, Signalis spends much of its play time as a modern take on classic survival horror.
Done in a gorgeous pixel style, Signalis takes its gameplay cues from some of the best that the survival horror genre has to offer, such as the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. Utilising a top-down display, the player controls Elster, a Replika bioorganic android on a mission to find her lover. Throughout the harrowing adventure, Elster will gain access to a variety of different tools and weapons, the former often specific to creative area puzzles and the latter offering a multitude of ways to engage enemies, from burning them with flare guns, to penetrating multiple with a powerful rifle, or crowd control with the shotgun. The catch? Elster is limited to only six items in her inventory at any given time, with no possible way to upgrade her capacity.
Much like the forefathers of survival horror, this limited inventory space inherently adds to the experience, forcing the player to choose between healing items, weapons, ammunition, and items that they may think are important. There were many instances in which, unknowingly, I had left a large portion of my inventory filled with different kinds of healing supplies and empty weapons, forcing myself to find my way back to a safe room in order to offload anything I could do without, which was often a difficult decision, as the paths between safe rooms and key items were anything but safe.
Every area is divided into small, claustrophobic rooms that are often small enough that they don’t even scroll across the screen and may be packed with various enemy types. Because items and ammunition is scarce, for every room the player is faced with the decision to engage the enemy and receive a brief amount of time to breathe while going through, or try to run past enemies to conserve their ever valuable ammo. I say brief because, as with games such as Resident Evil, not all defeated enemies will stay down. It’s cautioned to the player early on through an in-game note that defeated enemies will return to their feet at any given time unless they are burned, either with the thermite item or the use of the Flare Gun, obtained around the halfway point.
All but one enemy type will be immediately visible upon entering a room, and thus from any given doorway, it is easy to assess the situation and determine a course of action. Unless immediately detected, Elster often has a few seconds to survey the room and begin to move through it, sometimes able to get to the exit without being seen. Enemy detection can be forgiving to the player, however that fact is always welcome, namely because the aim of most encounters is to spare as much ammunition as possible and conserve resources.
Resource distribution was excellently paced. While I never fully ran out of ammunition, I never felt as if I had too much. If I had a full stack of pistol bullets, I could use those to clear a room, but in return, I would be desperate to find more as every subsequent room would have enemies that I wouldn’t have any defence against. Signalis is smart with how often it hands out its ammo, often prioritising rooms in which the player must put themselves in danger to get to the ammunition, either making the hits worth it or challenging the player to effectively use what little they have or were given. Despite some weapons emptying faster than others, by the time I had most of the available guns, I was never out of all ammunition. If my shotgun, pistol, and rifle were all out of bullets, I still had my flare gun and stun batons (and a heap of revolver ammunition, despite the fact that I actually missed that weapon in my playthrough).
The other side of inventory management is the key items for puzzles, and Signalis is filled to the brim with clever environmental puzzles that would make the likes of Resident Evil and other classic 90s games blush. One key aspect of the puzzle solving is Elster’s built-in radio that does not take up an inventory slot, instead a part of the status screen, next to easily accessible records of every single note the player has come across (which, itself, is vital to some of the puzzles.)
There are various puzzles that include Elster’s radio, from receiving morse code over six different frequencies and determining which code corresponded to which safe in the levels, to later using the various frequencies to play sounds into microphones to open puzzle boxes or display door codes. The radio even factors into combat in the latter sections of the game, where a specific enemy type can only be defeated by following the frequency that flashes on the screen.
While many of the puzzles also include finding and placing items in their proper places, others require paying close attention to the environment and the wording of notes that describe the puzzles themselves. One section that I particularly enjoyed struggling with was having to use a rotating diorama of the game’s fictional solar system to find the proper placement of emblems in a separate room in order to find a key item for a different puzzle. Most puzzles in Signalis are deeply unique and creative in their applications, often using every facet of gameplay and exploration to their advantage. It easily has the most engaging series of puzzles in a modern game, especially at a time when puzzles seem to be getting simpler and simpler to appeal to the widest audience.
With the broad strokes of gameplay out of the way, it’s time to get into the meat of what really makes Signalis as great as I truly believe it to be; the horror. There is one rule in Signalis, and it is the most important rule for any effective horror game to follow: atmosphere is king.
In the, roughly, ten hours of time I spent with Signalis, there was not a single jumpscare or attempt at a jumpscare. Any time that I did jump was through thorough payoff of rapidly escalating tension and my own faults as a player — mainly through missing enemies in my visual sweep of a room.
Through a masterful use of dark, grimy colour palettes, a minimalist art style that only captures the most important details, and excellent sound design, Signalis specialises in unease, discomfort, and dread. The sound, be it ambient or the score, is the biggest contributor. Elster’s slow footsteps through empty halls, the low whine of mere existence in a mutating hellscape, the squishy mush of organic globs of flesh growing out of steel and concrete, and disjointed industrial music terrifying enough to make Trent Reznor shed a tear, Signalis’ sound design takes every chance it gets to remind that player that you are not safe, and you never will be.
Even the safe room music is quick to tell you that safety is only a temporary luxury, that soon enough Elster will have to face the monsters of the dark, with low, synthetic piano notes playing in a minor key, almost broken. This music evokes memories of past survival horror greats, such as Resident Evil 4’s Save Theme, The Evil Within’s use of Clair De Lune, and many more.
The other major aspect of Signalis’ excellent horror atmosphere is its use of visual design of both its world and its enemies. Among the first notes that the player reads, they will be clued in to the fact that there is a sickness that has infested a mining facility, killing all humans and turning the Replika units into grotesque monsters.
Each different Replika unit transforms into a different enemy type, from regular, shambling zombie types, to gigantic armoured behemoths armed with mining lasers, to lumbering giants, with disturbingly long faces with which they use to attack the player. Later on, enemies become different, even more otherworldly than others, becoming shambling black voids in humanoid form that chase Elster through rooms. Upon discovery by any enemy type, a loud, blood curdling scream is let out, chilling enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.
Eventually, once you’ve seen each enemy type, it’s easy to say that they get old and their designs don’t hold the same weight they once did. By about thirty minutes into a given area, having learned it through all the backtracking, it’s easy to fall into a rhythm of simply running through each room, ignoring enemies. It’s common for most horror games to lose their fear factor after a certain amount of time; tricks lose their effectiveness, the player simply gets used to what’s presented — such examples are players stating that the Alien in Alien: Isolation was a lot less of a threat once they understood how the AI worked.
In spite of enemy types not remaining scary, Signalis manages to pace the player’s dread to such a fine degree, that it fully expects you to become comfortable before tossing you a curveball that will have you freezing in your tracks. When I got used to the cold, bloody concrete walls of one area, the next area would have pitch black rooms that contained sounds that I couldn’t identify, forcing the reservation of an inventory slot to use the flashlight. When dark rooms were easy to navigate, it would bring its greatest strength to the forefront: organic horror. Giant fleshy masses would protrude from walls, consuming the world, pulsating, and groaning, and writhing, sometimes even seemingly watching. When the masses on the walls, unsettling as they were, became commonplace? You would be forced to literally dive inside of the fleshy pits, as if journeying through the stomach of a great beast that devours all.
With the white noise of existence constantly playing in my ear, Signalis’ horror never got old, and the tension was constantly felt, and that’s not even getting into the first-person sections.
Sprinkled throughout the game to accentuate the plot beats that would not be as effective in a top-down perspective, Signalis uses a handful of first-person scenes to guide the player through aspects of the world and the game’s abstract plot. From navigating a secluded radio station located in a snowy mountain range to traversing a beach with blood red skies and strange structures off in the distance, the sense of dread does not let up in the new perspective, and despite not a single enemy or antagonistic force appearing within these sections, you can’t help but feel an inherent danger when playing through them.
Speaking of danger, while combat has been glossed over, I owe it to the game to delve deeper into how its combat heightens the experience despite the initial jank that it may seem to have on the surface. Having played on PC with the full advantage of having a mouse, Signalis’ combat improves on many facets of classic survival horror in multiple ways. Elster has a full, 360 degree range of motion and is able to shoot in any direction the player faces. When confronted with enemies, she has a lock on mechanic that helps give more precise aim when the need arises.
There are a few strategies to consider in direct combat. One is to immediately let loose your bullets when locking on to an enemy; this gives a slightly greater rate of fire for the price of lower damage. The other strategy is to hold the lock on for as long as possible, waiting for the locked square on the enemy to get as small as possible for a more precise, damaging shot. This will save ammunition, but it comes at the cost of substantially lowering the optimal rate of fire and allowing enemies to approach when not stunned by individual shots.
A quality of life addition is the ability to shove enemies that get too close. When aiming and locked on, if an enemy gets too close to Elster and is about to hit, pressing fire will instead shove the enemy back and give the player enough time to retreat or finally pull the trigger, giving some breathing room whenever enemies begin to crowd. Weapons are standard, as you’d expect, giving the regular loadout of: pistol, revolver, shotgun, rifle, submachine gun, and flare gun. For close quarters, Elster can hold up to four single-use stun rods at a time to defend herself from enemies getting too close, taking them down in one hit for a finishing stomp.
The combat shines in every encounter in which you choose to use it, each weapon with a low enough fire rate to instil a deep sense of danger, but each effective enough in their own right to make using them worth it. Every shot counts, and the fire rate, sound design, and visceral feel of every bullet can be felt through the screen as enemies close in, and bosses get ready for their strikes.
Signalis has a total of three bosses, each with their own strategy to defeat them — one of whom can even be defeated by not firing a single shot. Each of these bosses offer an exciting challenge and are all well telegraphed enough to the player to allow them to prepare for the fights ahead, often offering a slew of items they can use for the upcoming battle. Ultimately, and appropriately, it’s the final boss where the game’s combat really shines.
However, and this is a pretty major caveat, it is very much possible to soft lock in the first and final boss. If you don’t bring enough ammunition, it’s possible to run out and be stuck in the fight indefinitely until you either die or reload your latest save. The game does its best to prevent this through giving items before the fights and inside of the arenas, but that does not eliminate the possibility.
In my own experience with the final boss, I did not bring enough weapons, and thus could not use some of the ammunition I picked up during the fight, soft locking during a phase in which the boss transports the player to an empty arena, absent of both obstacles and items (conveniently, this was the last phase of the fight as well). Signalis works overtime to prepare the player for the fights, but still allows player error to halt their progress entirely. Whether that is positive or negative is subjective, but I personally believe this is a direct result of the player’s actions if this happens to them.
It’s quite obvious by now that I have not said much of anything about Signalis’ story and that is deliberate. Beyond simply being a tremendously abstract plot, dealing with dreams, fears, and different forms of existentialism, I feel it would be dishonest and, quite frankly, spoiling to go over what happens over the course of the game. It’s best experienced totally blind, allowing new players to piece the events together themselves and experience the macabre beauty of this delightfully horrifying game through their own eyes.
Throughout, Signalis uses a variety of different visual styles, languages, and storytelling methods to convey what it wants to say, it actively tricks the player during certain plot beats, it switches names and characters, and it never quite gives a full explanation for much of what goes on, but that’s the beauty of it. Eventually, the player can piece together the disparate shreds of what’s real and see the gorgeously tragic story beneath its horrifying visuals. It’s a truly unique experience that is best seen through fresh eyes.
Through its cutscenes, Signalis exudes a uniquely disturbing yet compelling style that you simply cannot pry your eyes from, always enraptured in what’s happening on screen, even if you may not understand it at first.
The best I can say is that, by the time the credits rolled and my final stats appeared on my screen, I found myself shedding tears at what I had witnessed, deeply affected by what rose-engine was saying. Very few games can boast about having that effect, and Signalis deserves every commendation I can give it.
