signalisnot my cup of tea, but despite that, i've enjoyed it.
Signalis is a survival horror game, akin to old titles like the original resident evil games, with a sci-fi setting. There really isn't any real narrative thread pushing you torwards beating it, by that I mean, while the game does have a story, it's not like mario that you have the goal of rescuing the princess, or metal gear where the goal is to infiltrate the facility, you just kinda boot up the game, play it, and then you learn what the fuck is going on later.
Survival horrors are in general games I don't really fuck with, despite having played stuff like fear anad hunger multiple times or the recently released look ouside, I tend to fidn them frustrating. THe way these games handle horror is quite different to a scary movie for example, they're not reliant on jumpscares, and in fact the whole horror thing is reserved torwards the atmosphere. The way these games become scary is honestly just fucking with the base mechanics and concepts of videogames as a whole, stuff like, "oh yeah you have limited resources and you can very much fuck up your savefile", so whenever a enemy jum ps at you from out of nowhere, and you burn out all your ammo and healing, because if not the enemy would have for sure killed you and you would have lost 40 minutes of gameplay you get scared. You're scared of either losing progerss or not being able to beat the game.
Having said all of that, I didn't find signalis scary, and that is because I found it to be quite easy, (but tbf I didnt fidn games like fear and hunger super scary either, again, it was more frustrating than anything else, didn't get a thrill whenever the run started going to shit, but instead I got annoyed). In signalis more enemies are easily avoidable, and frankly, not much icentive to even kill them, since they will respawn uunless you use a certain item you only get halfway into the game. There is health regeneration as well, you can't regen to full health, however, the game will warn you whenever you're 1 hit away of dying, and then it will slowly regen torwaerds you having around 3 hits. Not a lot, but more than enough to get from checkpoint to checkpoint without using health items.
The chekpoint system is also generous for this type of game. Signalis maps are not lineal, instead you have a small, closed section with a lot of puzzles. You will be backtracking and going ovber the same rooums over and over, this includes checkpoints. My final game stats indicated I had a total of an average time of 8 miutes and a half between each save, common enough for me to not dread losing progress, because if I have to redo 8 minutes, that's not too big of a deal.
This kinad leads to a typical items in a rpg escenario, where you're always reserving it for "the right moment". I've got to the end of the game and I don't think i've used 15% of the consumables. There is just no reason to really use them, and since the game is made so you fear the future of your playthrough, you always keep saving them.
While I found the general moving around and picking up stuff fun, I don't really fuck with the puzzles, mainly because i0m not a puzzle fan, but also because frankly, in this specific case, it does ruin my immersion of the game a bit. Whenever I play a game, I like to rp, to really see things from the eye of the protagonist.
Let's say you're in signalis, there are hoards of zombies outside the door, however, inside the room you're safe. Inside the room there is a pathway that you must cross that is locked by a 3 digit password. In this situation you could either go outside, risk dying yourself, to find a document that explains the password (if such document even exists), or... you could just brute force it?, try every combination?, it's not too long where that isn't a possibility. For the record i've not brute forced anything because I knew it wouldn't be fun, but I really wanted to as the lust feel the thing my character would have done in that situation.
Now t, the story. Frankly I didn't care at all. While signalis does have a plot, I don't like the way it's told, it's very reminiscent to something like dark souls or hollow knight, it's all essentially just lore. You pick up items and stuff that tell you about the backstory of something or explains some of the worldbuilding, and then you mustpuece everything out. I don't really like this format, because it would make a otherwise very simple story into one that is hard to understand, but that is kind of the point. Signalis has so many layers of abstraction to the story, mainl, because a lot of people just like that the story is hard to understand. Not necessarily deep, but hard to understand.
This game also puts a lot of importance on it's visuals. it has a very retro style thanks to the pixel art and the crt filter, but in addition to that, it uses other techniques considered to be cool. One of them, is the monogatary technique of just flashing random text that you cant understasnd or read fast enough even if you understood what was saying, to your face, this game will just flash german and japanese text to your face for no rason, what does the text say? it quite literally does not matter, however, it does look cool.
In this regard, having the story be lore rather than an actual plot helps to build ambiance, which I will admit, is very well done and cool.
Placd on A rank, I think this game is cool despite be shitting on it a lot.
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next: heavy rain