Signalis
Introduction
Signalis is a sci-fi survival horror video game made by indie game developer duo rose-engine. It was published by Humble Games and Playsim, and was released for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on October 27, 2022.
The game takes place in a retro-futurist science fiction world, where the Solar System is governed by the Eusan Nation. The player controls Elster, a robotic “Replika” unit searching for her co-pilot and “Gestalt” human companion Ariane, after their ship crashed on an unknown world. Over the course of the game, Elster will find herself in a variety of dangerous and horrifying environments, fighting off undead enemies in the hopes of keeping her promise to Ariane.
The game is played from a fixed, third-person top-down perspective with Elster exploring various self-contained rooms that all come together to form a maze-like environment, similar to early survival horror games like the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The player progresses through the game by solving puzzles and evading enemies; simply fighting your way through every adversary is made nigh-impossible by the game’s scarce ammo pick-ups, Elster’s limited inventory capacity, and the possibility that several enemies can get back up a few moments after they have been defeated.
Why This Game Matters
Signalis takes a great deal of inspiration from old-school survival horror games. On top of the similarities in top-down camera placement, it also features optional tank controls and contains an area of the game directly inspired by Nowhere, Silent Hill’s final location. Signalis feels like a loving homage to these old-school survival horror games; in an era where these games are getting frequent remakes, sequels, and remasters with modernized controls and visuals, Signalis proves that it’s still possible to tell a compelling survival-horror story with these old game mechanics and graphics.
Signalis is important to many queer horror fans, as Ariane and Elster are explicitly shown to be a lesbian couple; their flashback scenes and journal entries on the ship before it crashed are exceptionally sweet and heart-wrenching. Reading through these journal entries and playing through the flashback scenes, I could only wish that the two of them had been born into a kinder world.
Signalis is also great at keeping the player scared in a way I’ve never experienced in a horror game. The occasional switches to a first-person camera left me constantly fearful of an impending jump-scare. The game’s first brush with the cosmically horrifying is a perfect example: Elster crawls through a tunnel and appears in a cramped room, where the player (in first-person) looks around the room and encounters a copy of a book titled “The King in Yellow.” The cutscene that follows gripped and frightened me in a way no game has before; bright red screens of text are intercut with images of Elster’s face melting off of her robotic frame, all while distorted voices chant and contextless numbers (that you must memorize if you want the secret ending) overwhelm you.
Themes and Connections to Scholarship
Bioresonance and Mimicry
The plot of Signalis revolves around the fictional concept of bioresonance, a power that several enemies and Ariane herself can utilize to horrific ends. The most notable use of bioresonance comes in Ariane’s (intentional or otherwise) choice to copy Elster’s personality over hundreds of other LSTR units, turning them all into a garbled mess of memory and mimicry until only one notion remains: “Remember our promise.” Aleksander Sedzielarz and Meiru Liu write: “The name of the character’s avatar, Elster, is German for magpie, and Elster’s unit type frequently appears with the Chinese character for this bird. (...) Magpies possess an avian intelligence paralleling human intelligence. Here mimicry doubles as a questioning of the originality of intelligence and calls up ironic disturbances hysteria in which chains of endlessly repeated signifiers are indistinguishable from dream or memory.”
Analog Technology
Signalis follows in its survival-horror predecessors’ footsteps when it comes to old-fashioned technology. Old surveillance cameras track the player wherever they go, and boxy computer monitors are used to save the game. Ewan Kirkland wrote that “Analog media, asemulated within horror video games, operate according to various discourses of real-ism to enhance digital texts’ relationship with ‘the real.’” (124). This correlation between analog technology and realism maps perfectly to Signalis’s level design; the first few hours of the game (the Penrose and the Sierpinski Institute) are largely grounded in the dreary, analog mundanity of an office building. But as Elster descends through the game’s playable maps, these small pieces of mundane reality disappear: the Nowhere level has rooms that wouldn’t be found in any real building, has no map data, and is bereft of the red-lit surveillance cameras that have followed you through nearly every room.
Incursions from our Reality
Two recurring motifs in Signalis directly evoke two real-world works of art: Arnold Bocklin’s painting Isle of the Dead (often portrayed flickering with six alternate versions) and Robert Chambers’ horror anthology book The King in Yellow. Bocklin’s painting, shown with its several alternate iterations, is used to thematically relate to the cyclical nature of Signalis’ story. The King in Yellow is used to signify the game’s descent into chaos and madness; the book is present within Chambers’ original story as a supernatural and unknowable force that drives readers mad. Both works of real art are used within Signalis to blur the lines between fiction and reality, as if the real world were slipping into the fictional reality of the game. Tanya Krzywinska wrote, “Horror generally seeks to disguise the representational frame which helps to mark it out as fiction as a powerful means to intensify its affective effect” (294). Signalis doesn’t just attempt to disguise its fictional nature; it tries to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality.
Fake-Out Endings
In the conclusion of his book Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games, author Andrei Nae writes “Classical survival horror games engender a hypermedial gameplay buttressed by cumbersome mechanics, controls difficult to learn and use, a fragmentary representation of game space, a thwarting of the sense of progress, and a dearth of in-game resources which together put the usually male playable character in a position of heightened vulnerability.” (214) The phrase “thwarting of the sense of progress” is of special note here in relation to Signalis; at a certain point of the game, the player will finish exploring Nowhere and make it back to the Penrose, where Elster knows Ariane is waiting. She tries to open the door, but fails and tears her arm off in the attempt before falling to the ground, dead. The game treats this scene as if it were the ending of the game and sends the player back to the main menu. The game plays a similar trick on the player much earlier in the game, during the cutscene that occurs after Elster takes The King in Yellow: after some cryptic messages and horrific imagery, the game pretends that it has crashed. At multiple turns, Signalis tries to convince the player, just for a moment, that they have completely and utterly lost the game with no chance of ever winning; Signalis plays this trick to immerse the player in Elster’s headspace: she is desperate, exhausted, and angry at the world for keeping Ariane from her.
Disposable Monsters and Heroes Alike
A player will have to shoot, stun, stomp, or flee from scores of enemies across a playthrough of Signalis, but who are these undead units, and where did they come from? Zara Zimbardo asks, “Given that zombies function as the ultimate killable once-humans, it is crucial to pay attention to how the political category of zombies is wielded and by whom. Who are deemed not truly human, not fully alive, and thus monsters, undeserving of respect or protection?” (282) In Signalis’ case, the two most common enemy types, the corrupted EULR unit and the corrupted ARAR unit, are meant to be used by the Nation as cheap, low-level workers. To the totalitarian Nation, its workers are the ones deemed undeserving of respect or protection. Ariane, a bright mind with bioresonant abilities that may eventually exceed The Grand Empress, is shot out into the far reaches of space with an LSTR unit that she is clearly told not to treat like a person. After a few years of rocketing through empty space, the life-support systems on the ship begin to fail, and Ariane and Elster slowly start dying; this is all completely normal from the Nation’s viewpoint, which views these sacrificial expeditions into the void of space as routine and mundane.
Critical Reception
Signalis received largely positive reviews online upon its release, with Polygon’s Toussaint Egan calling it “a surprisingly intimate take on cosmic horror.” Stephanie Sterling had a considerably more mediocre time and rated it 6.5/10, though she still called it “one of the best retraux survival horrors out there. Eurogamer’s Sam Greer took special note of Signalis’ frequent references to other media, but wrote that “never do they override its own identity, they simply help frame its events.” Ruby Seals from the YouTube channel “Codex Entry” would disagree with that last remark, saying “Look, I have to draw a line somewhere and that line is at this place (Nowhere) looking and feeling like the place it stole its name from” (Codex Entry 52:05 - 52:13), referring to Nowhere’s similarity to the location of the same name in Silent Hill 2. Seals’ video essay, Perhaps, This is Hell: Signalis is otherwise glowing in its praise for the 2022 game, with deep analysis of the game and its influences, beautiful voice acting of the dialogue, and a surprisingly optimistic view of the game’s endings; whereas most fans of the game seem to believe that the promise Elster was meant to keep to Ariane was to put her out of her misery, Ruby looks at the game’s secret ending and asks: what if the promise they made to each other was simply “promise me we’ll dance with each other again?”
Gameplay Video
Full No Commentary Playthrough: https://youtu.be/65ReKM6Gbnc?si=WyjPA8JZ71uyInHo
Citations
Sedzielarz, A. ., & Liu, M. . (2024). “I felt the borders of my self blur”: Artificial Bodies and Worlds in <em>Signalis</em> and <em>Citizen Sleeper</em>. M/C Journal, 27(6). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3124
Kirkland, E. (2009). Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations. Games and Culture, 4(2), 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412008325483
Krzywinska, Tanya. “Gaming Horror’s Horror: Representation, Regulation, and Affect in Survival Horror Videogames.” Journal of Visual Culture, edited by Caetlin Benson-Allott and Eugenie Brinkema, vol. 14, no. 3, Dec. 2015, pp. 293–97, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412915607924.
Nae, A. (2022). Immersion, narrative, and gender crisis in survival horror video games. Routledge.
Zimbardo, Z. "It is Easier to Imagine the Zombie Apocalypse than to Imagine the End of Capitalism." Censored 2015: Inspiring We The People, edited by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff, Seven Stories Press, 2014, 269-294.
Egan, Toussaint. “Signalis Review: Potent, Terrifying Sci-Fi Survival-Horror on Game Pass.” Polygon, Polygon.com, 25 Oct. 2022, www.polygon.com/reviews/23402312/survival-horror-game-signalis-review-game-pass-platforms-release-date/.
Sterling, James Stephanie. “Signalis - Shattered Memories (Review).” The Jimquisition, 6 Nov. 2022, www.thejimquisition.com/post/signalis-shattered-memories-review.
Greer, Sam. “Signalis Review - a Sumptuously Atmospheric Survival Horror.” Eurogamer.net, 25 Oct. 2022, www.eurogamer.net/signalis-review-a-sumptuously-atmopsheric-survival-horror.
Seals, Ruby. “Perhaps, This is Hell: SIGNALIS (Summary & Analysis) [Feat. SulMatul]” YouTube, 4 Mar. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkkB3G9aIKU.
AI Disclosure
No generative AI was used in the creation of this essay, and to my knowledge, no generative AI was used in any of my citations.