I. I dream of it often:
II. a younger version of myself,
III. standing at the bottom of the ocean;
IV. arms aloft,
V. mouth agape,
VI. eyes glaring
VII. not seeing,
VIII. not breathing,
IX. still as stone in a watery fane.

I.

There’s me.

I’m dreaming, in the dark with my hair spiraling all around me as if lifted by water’s drifting. My senses arise from a Body and its eyes open suddenly. Turning to the right, the Body sees Myself from outside. I realize I am outside Myself, and that if Myself is not where my perceptions rests, the Body must not be me. These eyes see Myself open my eyes and turn in kind, to face the Body.

It is a look of disdain. I hate my Body- it is a stranger to Myself.

When I wake it is without any sense of rest.

II.

I have lived most of my life inside of a surreal semi-haze. Psychosis and worry disenfranchised me from the comfort of certainty when I was still small, and have since instilled in me a stark skepticism of symbols. A particularly keen fang in the mouth of uncertainty I’ve felt has been in my dreams. What dreams are exactly doesn’t interest me; it is what my personal dreams do.

Where some (often crackpot behaviorists) argue on the nature of dreams as being manifestations of subconscious desire or interpretation of higher consciousness, I simply observe in writing what occurs in my dreaming time. It never means anything, never symbolizes anything, never works with clever conceit or measured intention. I have wormed my way through sleeping imaginations of the most absurd misery and most debased pleasure I could hope to describe and woken knowing these things will never follow me out- knowing that the door is closed and that this side is the side with all of me.

I know dreams annihilate semiotics.

Also, this is a piece about Signalis. (mentioned so I don’t get flagged like on my Returnal review)

III.

A dream about dreaming.
Are you still looking for answers where there are only questions?

Signalis refuses staunchly notions of easy unravelling. It is crafted to invite pondering, interpretation and iteration. It calls constantly into question the reliability of subjective position, on sensory information, on basic causality in narrative form, and it does that with intention. The game’s surrealism and fugue-like nesting of symbols-into-narrative-into-representation continues on past its termination, eating its own tail. The narrative is about one who dreams, presented itself as a dream utterly laden with semiotics and suggested meaning that arrives at nothing aside from its own beginning again.

What it does not seem to intend is a longwinded moralization of the nature of these semiotics in what is already an absurd landscape of gay anime women, (cool) space travel, (cool) and dystopian leftism-as-fascism (UH OH!)

The setting is derived from ours; it is an alternate earth- or more accurate, an alternate solar system. Different names for worlds and peoples, governments that seem to derive semiotically (important) but not directly from real-life regimes The game takes place on multiple planets, on space ships, in cities, and on trains, none of which are connected to one another. Doors leading out of one screen lead you to the wrong side of another. You spend a large chunk of the game in nowhere. You double back to reimagined versions of the same space over and over. The symbols you start picking at on the game’s start begin to grow meaningless, debased out of symbolic significance.

Needless to say, if you haven’t played Signalis, do. Maybe you’ll enjoy it or maybe not- some people don’t do well with horror or will be frustrated by the inventory system. You might just love it because of the aesthetics which is fair because it’s a gorgeous game. Regardless, play it. If all you want is a recommendation, stop here and go enjoy a neat video game.


If you wanna read more about the action of intention and clever use of dreams as a sort of anti-informational condiment for narrative, on we go.


IV.

I do not have a relationship with the people who work at rose-engine. I don’t know them personally and I’m sure that if I want poking around with my lurid hooked digits, I could dig up any number of decontextualized tweets or past creative endeavors that I could point at and say that I think I understand them and their intentions, but I wont do that. I can only state what their intentions seem to be; what I personally think their intentions are and where intention cleverly flirts with uncertainty.

With that said, I find the framing of Signalis as itself being a dream about dreaming to be both very intentional and uniquely effective in acting on its purpose.
One knows that a video game is crafted intentionally. Signalis didn’t spring to life in the space of a fitful evening, but it chases actively a suspension of logic on a scale that goes far deeper than its representations of fragile love, morphic horror, and political bludgeoning. The main character is chasing a woman she loves, the world is full of nightmarish perversions of form, and the stars are ruled by a fascist regime that wears semiotics resembling the DDR. According to a now-deleted tweet by the author of Signalis’s world, it is also one devoid of homophobia and racism… as well as cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol. They then went on inform readers that these facts were not any sort of supplementary lore dump so much as guiding principals they followed in the game- a sort of micro-sized “making of” post.

These things seem, to me, decided arbitrarily to serve Signalis as a whole piece of work, rather than to moralize on the particulars of projecting a future communism into space or the intricacies of anime space lesbians. From my perspective, these elements were instead chose with intention to emulate the way dreams annihilate the precision of semiotics. The significance of the number six, the use of tarot cards, the throughline of gestalts and their replika counterparts that is left unresolved without concrete answers as to where exactly they connect; this is pointed and intentional to make you consider not just the symbols you are looking at, but why you are looking at those symbols at all. You begin to wonder what you hope to learn in the esoteric melange of patterns and repetition, in the same way that treading water in a dream feels like drowning in sweat-stained linen.

V.

Some people think this game is anti-communist. I do not think it is. I think the oppressive regime represented by the game’s New Nation, drenched in the symbology of socialist germany, is an intentional choice by the developers (based in Germany) to further the game’s dreamlike surrealism by dressing up what is unabashedly classical fascism in the symbology of a troubled and failed socialist project.

If read outside of the game’s context, yes. Sure. It looks pretty reactionary- but so does fucking everything after you’ve read some of Lenin’s speeches and you’ve got the fires of liberty, equality and fraternity alight in your breast.

(These are good fires to light, by the way. Never too late to start your reading!)

But I think a little more effort is worth exerting. As many enemies of communism will gleefully point out, men like Hitler and Mussolini began their political careers in the DAP and PSI respectively. On the surface level, the average person may hear this and conclude yes, leftism leads to fascism without actually internalizing that the ascent of these vile demagogues was done through the only the symbolic elevation of populism, worker’s rights, and nationalism without the actual elimination of oppression. This sounds a lot like Signalis’s New Nation, dressed in the symbology of anti-liberalism but without the intention of uplift and equality.

I’m not gonna pretend that Signalis is extremely scathing in its critique of populism without the elimination of oppression, but when you pair it with Signalis’s other narrative tricks of misdirection and its air of unreality, you can pretty easily see that these semiotics are presented intentionally to force you to consider what is actually going on. It also doesn’t provide much of an answer- that’s the point. This is a dream about dreaming, not a moral manual or a nice red book.

VI.

I don’t want to be a man or a woman.
I want to be unbearable.

Signalis is also a dream about dreaming about love, but not widescreen love and the shape it takes on the political stage; the game paints in the messy and loud reds of personal love. What it means to love an individual, what it means to be an individual in love, where the individual ends and the love begins. It is about obsession and dependency. It’s about the dark room you share with your lover, the little house you pace the same little paths in from one end to another. It’s about being with one another, away from the world- until the world forces you to look out the window, because a rock’s been thrown through.

The rock, in this case, isn’t institutionalized homophobia or the violent proliferation of anti-trans rhetoric so much as it is random tragedy. The stone in glass-scatter wreckage is memory loss, it is innavigable distance, and it is illness.

Ariane is sick and dying. Her hair is falling out, and she coughs up blood. She falls out of wakefulness and into terrifying dreams. She wants it to end. It is nothing so dignified and mighty as learned thinkers on a galactic stage waging a war of ideology- the perceived scale is small. The game’s few characters suffer within the word-and-picture dream, both in the moving diorama we play and in the narrative. Grief compounds, trauma is compartmentalized.

Sometimes, love is a kind of horror. Not just because the world is cruel, but often because the world is cruel. The reason we feel grief isn’t only the worldly injustice, though. It isn’t the conditions that lead to the horror; the reason is the loss itself. Grief is love with nowhere to go.


VII.

Out past beyond the field
Inside the birches
Under rising steam:
A small room

To prove I don't exist
To show that I am beyond
This animal form
And this lost mind
Or am I?

The wood heats up and cracks
And pulls apart
The way the body groans
I transform and the stars show
I don't think the worlds still exists
Only this room in the snow
And the lights through the cold
And only this breath

VIII.

One day I’ll simply close my eyes and nothing’ll happen.

IX.

The gameplay is tight, atmosphere very heavy and easy to drop into and stay in. Aiming’s weird, but not enough to upset me. Every piece of visual information is presented inventively and artfully. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It offers nothing aside from what it is, trusting you to take from it what you will. There's bravery in that as a creative, because it means you are willing to accept some people will misconstrue your intention either willfully or simply out of ignorance. It’s also the most honest way to present any story, in my experience. It doesn’t tell or show beyond its puzzle-box story delivered out of order and with zealous abandon and its sleight-of-hand semiotics.

It drops you into the water, pooling at the base of a stone coffin. It upends a box with some tarot cards and hexagon stones, some radio frequencies and great pillars of black in an ocean of red sand.