'Signalis' Review

Broken code

Amid a morass of hard sci-fi concepts and Lovecraftian nebulosity, the primary failing of Signalis is its inability to create intimacy, preferring instead to bombard the player with jump cuts to eerie tableaus and plain text on red in place of developing legitimate depth to the protagonist's journey to find a missing loved one, per a promise made. It's a central thread pulled from the hunter-green overcoat of James Sunderland and Silent Hill 2 - actually one of the subtler ones pulled, if you can believe it, with wholesale dialogue being 'borrowed' - but theirs is woven from believable and cogent emotion, dealing directly with grief in all its ugliest beauties. Signalis stumbles from an overemphasis on abstraction and aesthetic, at the cost of never creating a compelling psychology for its lead, nor anchoring their struggles in a place of identifiable reality. "Perhaps this is hell." Is it? Where does metaphor end and reality begin? Does the order of plot events even matter? Were the eight hours prior to the ending in service of that resolution, or incidental to it? When there are no rules to the spaces in which we inhabit from the first moment, where then is left to go? Delving deeper into Signalis feels less like unraveling a potent mystery, and more like obliging whatever murky intent hangs above it all.

An impressively intricate display from a two-person development team, Signalis's evocation of fifth-generation survival horror crafts quite the smothering atmosphere, but unfortunately too often falls into being 'archaic' over merely feeling classic, most preeminently by a similarly-smothering item inventory. If any semblance of momentum could rise out of the detailed dereliction, it's utterly quashed by having to pause a limitless stream of 'green-key-to-green-door' puzzles with return trips to a stage's solitary safe room, swapping out or outright forgoing healing items and weapons just for the ability to pick up what's necessary to progress. All you need to know, really, is that Signalis is a game wherein the payoff of an entire level's worth of puzzling is a door requiring six keys - each requires its own interpretation of 'key-to-door' to collect in the first place - when you yourself only have six spaces of inventory. "Restriction breeds tension" is a facet of survival-horror, of course, but there's a line where the hopeless feeling of having to ignore all the items in my path stops being about fear for my chances, and instead turning progression into a dispassionate spate of back-and-forth errands. Overly restrictive and oblique to a fault, Signalis is muddled, misguided, and cold as a corpse-laden moon.