This review contains spoilers
Full disclosure - I am a fraidy-cat who can't handle horror games at all, so after playing the first couple hours I started using a mod that enabled the dev console, so I had unlimited bullets and inventory slots. I'm sure that the game lost a lot of its tension with me playing like this, but I'd rather finish the game than bounce off when it got too scary. That being said...
Wow, Signalis is an INCREDIBLE game. It wears its influences on its sleeve but gosh it sure bundles them into a beautiful package. Every aesthetic detail is perfect - crunchy, haunting music and sound effects, brilliant character and monster designs, monolithic and awesome structures and environments - seriously, this is basically the best 'pixel art' I've ever seen in a game. I was particularly impressed by the UI, which was wonderfully diagetic and stylized while remaining intuitive and even fun to use.
The gameplay itself is very strong, with combat feeling tense and satisfying and only very occasionally feeling tedious (you can mostly run past everything). The puzzles are interesting and varied (though some might find them easy) - but overall I appreciated the dedication to user-friendliness both here and elsewhere. The most frustrating aspects of the gameplay are the boss fights and the inventory size. Thankfully the boss fights - which tend to require a little too much evasiveness and heavy resource expenditure - are very infrequent, and the final boss is so visually and thematically impressive I can't imagine the clunkiness getting in the way. The inventory size is obviously intentionally small to enhance the importance of decision making, but with only 6 slots, some of the lategame puzzles (which require 3-6 items) meant either a lot of backtracking or running around with no weapon/healing.
The story is, alongside the visuals, the highlight. It's a fantastically told story of human failure and cosmic horror, a little Lovecraft, a little Evangelion, a little Blade Runner, but through all the scifi horror I was most impressed with the humanity (lol), the interpersonal relationships. Being a classic survival horror, there's little space here for dialogue or real-time interaction, but between what is there and what we see in cutscenes and logs, the devs manage to create some of the most honest and heartbreaking characterizations I've seen in a game like this.
Please go play Signalis.
Wow, Signalis is an INCREDIBLE game. It wears its influences on its sleeve but gosh it sure bundles them into a beautiful package. Every aesthetic detail is perfect - crunchy, haunting music and sound effects, brilliant character and monster designs, monolithic and awesome structures and environments - seriously, this is basically the best 'pixel art' I've ever seen in a game. I was particularly impressed by the UI, which was wonderfully diagetic and stylized while remaining intuitive and even fun to use.
The gameplay itself is very strong, with combat feeling tense and satisfying and only very occasionally feeling tedious (you can mostly run past everything). The puzzles are interesting and varied (though some might find them easy) - but overall I appreciated the dedication to user-friendliness both here and elsewhere. The most frustrating aspects of the gameplay are the boss fights and the inventory size. Thankfully the boss fights - which tend to require a little too much evasiveness and heavy resource expenditure - are very infrequent, and the final boss is so visually and thematically impressive I can't imagine the clunkiness getting in the way. The inventory size is obviously intentionally small to enhance the importance of decision making, but with only 6 slots, some of the lategame puzzles (which require 3-6 items) meant either a lot of backtracking or running around with no weapon/healing.
The story is, alongside the visuals, the highlight. It's a fantastically told story of human failure and cosmic horror, a little Lovecraft, a little Evangelion, a little Blade Runner, but through all the scifi horror I was most impressed with the humanity (lol), the interpersonal relationships. Being a classic survival horror, there's little space here for dialogue or real-time interaction, but between what is there and what we see in cutscenes and logs, the devs manage to create some of the most honest and heartbreaking characterizations I've seen in a game like this.
Please go play Signalis.