Signalis is a love letter to the last two decades of the survival horror genre and in my opinion, stands among the best as a testament to how passion can fuel some of the greatest works. It’s so good in fact you wouldn’t believe it was developed by a studio of two over eight years.
Stellar visual design, incredible world-building, intuitive puzzles, strong survival horror gameplay and a thought-provoking story that differs from person to person. This game is ripe for revisits as you explore a facility overrun by monsters in a desolate universe where people cling to dreams and memories.
Signalis wears its inspirations on its sleeve and masterfully builds upon years of survival horror design while having its own identity, unlike anything I’ve played and will leave its mark on anyone that plays it.
Oh, if this sounds like a fun time to you and you want the game for yourself, QooApp is currently having an SNS Campaign and we’ll be giving away five Signalis Steam Keys to randomly selected participants! All you need to do is follow our official Twitter and Retweet the specific posts! The campaign will be held until December 19, so don’t wait!
▍A Horrifically Beautiful Sci-fi Nightmare
Signalis is a 3D top-down survival horror game where you control a character who moves like a tank as you navigate through the dark corridors of what can only be described as someone’s personal hell.
Without spoiling anything, in Signalis you play as LSTR or Elster, an android and part of a machine workforce called Replikas. After you wake up from a pod on a shuttle called the Penrose-512, you find yourself stranded on a snowy planet with your co-pilot missing. With an empty cryopod, a broken and bloodied keycard and the remaining hazmat suit, you set out to the cold empty planet to find your partner, only to find yourself in a facility overrun with mutated Replikas.
Signalis does a great job of setting up this world through its use of colour, lighting and incredibly cool world design. In classic horror titles, the camera is set at fixed angles to obstruct important information until you get close. Signalis does the same with the camera constantly following LSTR as you move except in small rooms. This lets the game reveal, and obstruct key items and dangers when it needs to, to both prod at your curiosity and make you fear what’s around the next corner.
▼ You enter this room from the left, and your eyes are guided by the colourful item, towards the table, and then to the STORCH unit.
As I’ve mentioned Signalis is in 3D, but you wouldn’t know that at a first glance with its beautifully drawn pixel art and crisp visuals. The background, objects, and environmental obstacles are also covered in dirt and dust, creating this lived-in look that really helps to instil the idea that things were better here, but not anymore.
Every room you’ll run into looks visually distinct, which helps when you’re revisiting many rooms and keeps you from getting lost. Even if that wasn’t the case, the game’s map marks what areas you’ve been to and which ones you have yet to unlock.
▼ Yellow Doors are locked doors blue indicates doors you can enter, red indicates doors that you can simply ignore.
The game nails its atmosphere in no small part due to its excellent audio design. The game’s score and sound effects make up a huge part of the game’s uneasy feeling. As you walk through hallways with sounds of whirring fans, footsteps that aren’t yours and more that build up to the moment a monster sees you and lets out their high-pitched screams. Then the music just assaults you with heavy drumming beats and your adrenaline’s pumping, as your fight or flight reaction kicks in. Going with headphones is definitely the way to go.
What’s also just as impressive is how the game just knows when to not use sound. There are several areas where there’s just no ambient noise and nothing but silence which gives you time to reflect or prepare for what you’re about to walk into. It isn’t all bad though, as in true survival horror fashion there is that incredibly sweet music when you enter a safe room that manages to be both disturbing, and oddly comforting at the same time.
In trading away the cheap thrill of jumpscares, Signalis create a setting that’s both incredibly empathetic, while triggering every synapse in your body to get out as soon as possible. Every inch of the environment feels lived in, with clothes, memorabilia, and notes left by people that are no longer around, with that kind of life long gone. It’s tense, sad, and a sight for a bleak future that no one wants, but very believable.
▍The Revival of Classic Survival Horror Gameplay
If you’re anything at all familiar with survival horror games, then you’ll know the basic flow of Signalis. It’s a third-person shooter where there are a lot of enemies and not enough ammo. Hallways and rooms are filled with enemies out to get you, and barely enough room to squeeze by, all while you have to solve a series of puzzles and collect items to escape.
Signalis is in many ways more accessible than the original titles though, addressing issues other survival horror games have, and borrowing some neat mechanics from others. Take shooting for instance. In Signalis aiming is a matter of hovering a cursor near the direction of an enemy, and your gun will lock onto them. If you keep it aimed at an enemy, Elster steadies her aim and lets her deal more damage per shot. It’s a neat way to make slower enemies a little more threatening, as cancelling a shot is sluggish, and the longer you aim, the more likely you are to get hit.
After you’ve downed the enemy, you still have to run up and finish them off with a kick, which can be tricky in rooms with multiple mobs and a limited ammo pool. Because despite the game’s multiple weapons, and tools to help get out of nasty situations, Elster often can’t take advantage of them all at once.
Much like Chris from Resident Evil, Elster can only carry six items at a time. So while you’re exploring and finding useful stuff, you’ll have to make the choice of deciding if it’s worth backtracking for an item and risk-taking damage or using up ammo, or making room for key items, but with fewer tools to deal with enemies.
And that’s important because Signalis has a lot of puzzles that drive the game’s progression Each major area generally has one large puzzle to solve, and multiple smaller ones that lead up to it, piling up together like a jigsaw as you work towards exiting the facility.
I love the puzzles in Signalis, because no matter how long it may have taken me to do them, I never actually felt lost. Signalis is always ready to hand subtle clues towards beating the game, you just have to piece it together yourself. If I was ever stuck on a puzzle, all it really meant is I was missing something from a room I clearly didn’t visit, or there was a clear clue from one of the items I didn’t catch. It’s hard to get lost trying to find something when the game’s detailed map shows everywhere you can, can’t, or haven’t gone to yet.
Having an incredibly easy-to-read map gives you just enough hints about where to go while reminding you of the unimportant stuff is a godsend. I used to get stuck on Resident Evil 1 puzzles because the solutions and placements of items just didn’t make sense to me, and I often couldn’t find or figure out the one item I needed to solve the puzzle. Now in Signalis, I know where I need to go, I know what I need, and I can focus on actually figuring out the puzzle.
It’s also nice to have all of these puzzle hints contextualised through lore. None of the notes and items in the game betrays its world-building, with things like a password to a bunch of saves hidden behind some angry employee’s letter, or finding out a grandma has the password to her store from her granddaughter’s ID. Everything you do helps you learn more about the world, while also adding more questions, fueling your curiosity.
If there is one gripe I have with the game though it’s that because the game’s combat is intentionally stiff, boss encounters that end up feeling a little clunky. I get that it’s something similar to how it felt in Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but I’d still be remiss to not mention that the boss encounters are some of the weaker moments of the game in terms of gameplay, but make up for it in its presentation and design.
▍The Thrill of Re-Experiencing a Fresh Hell
Since it’s closer to classic Resident Evil games, Signalis of course has a bit of nice replay value in its multiple endings, but there is a questionable lack of unlocks.
Signalis has multiple endings you can obtain based on how you perform, with three unique endings and a fourth secret ending requiring a bit of messing around and secret finding. These endings are based on how many enemies you defeat, how much you interact with the world and how much time you spend on them, making you adopt wildly different playstyles if you want to see these endings.
Outside of that though, the real motivation is to experience the story again. Signalis’ narrative is told non-linearly, and by the time you finish your first run, you’ll have many answers and even more questions, most of which you can figure out from a second playthrough of the game.
It’s a bit of a shame that there aren’t any cool unlocks like an extra weapon, new outfits or infinite ammo like in Resident Evil, but that was never really one of the focuses of the game. It’d still be nice to include something like that in a small update later to help encourage replayability, as an average first-time session of 6-8 hours just begs to be replayed and speedran.
▍The Perfect Game for Horror Fans, and Cowards
Admittedly I am not the biggest fan of horror games, I’ve only played a handful of them because as thrilling as the feel of being afraid can be, I’d rather enjoy a nice action title. Signalis however is one of those titles that I can say I’m glad to have experienced.
An original take on a bleak sci-fi world, with fantastic storytelling, thrilling survival horror gameplay and fun puzzles to solve leaves you with an experience that leaves you many mixed emotions by the time you put the controller time. Halfway through the game, I couldn’t wait for it to end because of how terrifying its world was, but on the other hand, I didn’t want it to end because it was just too much fun, and that’s a rare feeling.
Signalis is a game that just sticks with you on your first, second, or fifth run through the game, with so much to offer after you’ve left the game in the back of your mind with its incredible story with so much to tell, and so much to think about.
No matter if it’s your first foray into the survival horror genre or you’re a veteran, Signalis is an absolute joy to play and there are very few games out there that offer such a memorable experience, at its price.
*This review was conducted on the PC version of Signalis via Steam, is the game is also available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.