goated game. soyjacked at the "line of flight" drop. you guys just don't fw adorno hard enough. crashed before i could see the end

seriously though, i do find myself kinda frustrated at concepts of post-irony/metamodernism/new sincerity or whatever. people are tired of "postmodernity" (something i have my own critiques of, even as i hate jameson for popularising the term but w/e) and feel we can simply move beyond, take a new step forwards, without really understanding what "postmodernism" tried to do; postmodernism is a mood, a vibe, an era, not anything actualised outside of a vague gesticulation. this game, however, is not a very good look at that. I just wish actually understanding foucault + derrida was required before you read fisher, because I think a look at the deployment of hyper-confessional and overwhelmingly sincere art of the 202X's would be interesting - something not really found here except as a handwave to thoughts and books picked up from crit theory 101.

Idealistic and a semi-transcendentalist piece. Disliked the messaging and weird ideological conception - obviously rife with anti-vanguardist policy, but the conclusion cuts off it's nose to spite the face; fundamentally it re-inscribes the passivity of revolutionary liberalism back onto what it itself acknowledges as a violent process. It feels as if it cannot reckon with tools necessitated in a struggle, and is therefore always in a process of deferring responsibility/violence (both in alterity and futurity, to the other, to the space beyond). Caught in this contradiction - at once acknowledging the revolutionary nature of struggle and denying the struggle of revolution - it becomes a self effacing process; a bloodless revolution, a tenth of capitalism already killed - by what? what wounds were necessitated by such a process? The text cannot interrogate it - mysticising it into an ordinariness of mythical nature, a messianism that has already happened and yet is still to come - by whom? why not you, the nukes at your fingertips? In a certain sense, then, it forgets what cannot be forgotten - that which must be forgot in order for anything novel - the violence of forgetting that must be expelled and held. The ordinary is valourised without ever being encountered, the process left open, undetermined (idealised) and therefore endlessly critical, without any idea of what itself can do.
sorry this is gibberish. i just didn't like this very much.
the art is cute tho ^x^

Deleuze + Signalis
This ended up more an essay than a review. Also, I’m not going to cite this properly, but all sources are provided at the end. Sorry! ^w^
CW for suicide/death

Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead are a series of Swiss symbolist paintings, painted through five separate versions of the same scene, produced from 1880 to 1886. It depicts someone rowing to/from a crescent-like island, a second figure stands at the stern, statuesque in white, as if marble. The island is large, foreboding, the figures small, miniature-esque, no matter the medium or year. I’m not particularly enamoured by the piece itself, but the idea of the repetitions and transformations of the same concept has always interested me, the impression of the painting untied, always linked to the ways that they are represented to us. In different variations, the disturbances of the water from the prow shows the boat moving towards or away from the island. Especially interesting is the fact that Böcklin edited the first version – updated, perhaps – to keep it in line with an addition he made to the second. The boat and the figures aboard were not an original fixture in the piece, when now it is what the eye focuses on. The stability of the scene is disrupted through this edit, the rowing man and the standing woman, art made into the white foam off a wave of continuity rather than the stagnant permanence imposed in galleries.

One of the main themes which struck me from SIGNALIS is Die Toteninsel, a reference to the origin of the repeated motif– a semi-hypnotic 5 note pattern, crawling as it changes – from Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, which itself was inspired by a black and white reproduction of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead he saw in 1907. The adaptation of this theme by 1000 Eyes is a tad slower, but rather than seeming lethargic, it allows an emphasis on the ephemeral quality of the original’s opening, sometimes lost even in the best of recordings, such as Pletnev’s hastier version, with the Russian National. It’s the primary reason as to why I far prefer Svetlanov’s recording, with the BBC Symphony, even to Rachmaninoff’s own recording; an unusual pacing allows more creative handling and a far more deliberate and lasting progression towards the Dies Irae – one accentuated by viola tremolo, of all things. These first five notes, however, are the prelude to the scene itself, the point at which the music most embodies the painting: a slow drift over a calm surface, the prow of Charon’s boat only lending to a kind of intense, fixated, stillness. The mist-drenched scene is one inscribed with a sense of dread, gentle movement over slight eddies towards something more, something worse.

The music is one of the main draws of any game for me, and the use of semi-acerbic industrial noises in Riot Control made teeth itch in a way few game soundtracks have. This is a staple of the soundtrack, a kind of grating-ness which puts into harsh relief the relation between the character and environment, rooms hostile even within the apparent human basis of construction. Therefore, the pieces which break from this allow a reprieve from anxiety inducing hallways, leaving the repeated use of the 5/8 motif unusually affecting. It again rears its head in Ewige Wiederkunf – another name verging on pun, eternal return – this time on the organ (an easy way to win my heart), where the haunting quintuplet gives way for a rippling layer, itself only making space for almost sporadic piano notes; the placid sea of noise formed by the organ remains, even as it fades out of understanding.

In a critical but also fundamentally historical turn, Deleuze attempts to peel back the layers of domination representation has secured in his genetic-evaluative principle-thesis, Difference and Repetition. This is primarily done through a dissection of identity and how difference and repetition relate. Importantly, and easily misunderstandable, he explores this through the concept of intensive difference – differences that are fundamentally changed through itself. For example, length – 2 centimetres being divisible into two identical lengths – is extensive, whereas temperature – 2 degrees being divided results in one degrees (0-1) being different from the other (1-2) – is intensive. The entire project is, essentially, following this to the logical conclusions, the real escaping the stability afforded by the Platonic forms, replaced with an embroiling sea of immanence.

The centrality of the focus of pure difference in Deleuze’s philosophy is difficult not to understate: difference not between fixed identities but between expressions of pure movement, alteration between undefined points. This process, of differentiation of Ideas as multiplicities of intensive difference, is attempted in the same way that the dy/dx makes visible the Idea of the curve. The relations of Ideas and the Ideas themselves are ungraspable, where nothing is afforded proper stability, leading to an ontology married to becoming. While Ideas are not actual, Deleuze wants to validate their ontological realness, allowing for the virtual, the realm of pure intensive difference, coming about through the interconnectedness of the series, determining the structural properties through bringing into relation a multiplicity of other undetermined elements, without ascribing predicates to a subject. The virtual is thus alternative to the real-possible distinction, allowing an Idea – something that exists entirely in the virtual – to plague us from outside the world of the actual, but within the real. To make something actualised is therefore not to make something new, but instead merely to realise the virtual via creative process, which in turn reciprocally produces change within the virtual itself. We cannot ever grasp the virtual, only ever feel the effects of it, in the same way that trauma is never itself actualised. With multiple expulsions of a single trauma, the repetition is defined via variation along the difference of each substantiation of it, rather than the trauma itself as singular, separable, identity. As Willliams explains, ‘[Each] walk that you take everyday is different each time and significant each time because it involves variations in intensities with respect to earlier and later ones and changing relations with wider series. You change with the walk and with the sensations and their intensities’. Thus, each walk is made unique, but also reciprocally determined by and determines the subject.

The Swiss modernist Gerard Meier wrote a novel of the same title – Toteninsel – a slow, drifting chat between two aging men, the long speeches of one blurring to the thoughts of the other. In the few rare moments of silence from Baur, Bindshädler considers the plight of the crickets, the ‘philharmonic muscle orchestra’, a background layer of the distant noise of the world, inhabiting and inhibiting the walk. The descriptions emphasise the almost alien nature of it – teeth on wings, ears on legs –exaggerating the etchings the world imprints on us, a blade caressing the lines of the body. The book is intensely occupied with art, past walking alongside present in poorly disguised autobiography, riddled in the spiralling structures of sentences. Art exhibits exactly what Meier is so fascinated by in the face of his twilight years: intensities encroaching, interrupting, yet also furnishing a winding wend.

Death in the sphere of the virtual becomes something extended beyond the death in the actual. It is inspired by Freudian and Heideggerian deaths, where the actual death becomes an event our entire lives become determined by, in relation towards – Freud with the death drive, Heidegger with being-towards-death. In either case, life is defined by its cessation. However, Deleuze’s use of death is more forgetfulness, an amnesia of what we were to allow for the birth of what we are, and what we will be. The small deaths dissolve the self, allowing for a constant state of becoming. These can only be understood as virtual deaths, opposed to the final cessation that the actual death provides us. In order to connect anew, we must relinquish the permanence of any particular self or body, a ritual forgetting. Suicide brings an odd dilemma, in the sense that it appears to try and force the actual death and its double to release together, to be entangled and intertwined in one singularity. The deaths of the virtual and the actual death can never resolve, however, so every suicide is ultimately futile; the deaths in the virtual cannot coalesce with the actual, because the actual suicide creates new intensities even as it cancels older ones. Therefore, the actual and the virtual play a dance, always at arm’s length from one another, following each other’s moves – an unequal one, but so too ballet. Each attempt to force the two only releases new intensities, re-interpreted back into the actual.

Why do I bring Deleuze up in a review ostensibly about SIGNALIS? Perhaps to make use of a philosophy degree of rapidly waning usefulness. But also because I believe that SIGNALIS can only be understood in its obscurities. Instead of dismissing the usage of historical artifacts in the game-space as heavy-handed and ill-construed emphases on the loop-like nature, paratextual instances are instead the basis for understanding the relations of characters; each is formed by and generates its own intensities through disruptions, each one reaffirming and in turn determining the virtual. To understand the game as an intertwinement of transcendent characteristics – a repetition of Elster’s love, or an element of over-arching permanence to Ariane’s identity – completely ignores the lengths to which dominance of a singular, identarian approach is undercut.

SIGNALIS can be most thoroughly felt in impressions from the bones and carcasses of others; the safe rooms and puzzles are eerily (and often frustratingly) similar to older Resident Evil games, the abstracized plot to Silent Hill, the setting to Dead Space, the regurgitation of classic music (Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schubert). Most notably and obviously there are textual references to the King in Yellow (Chambers), Die Toteninsel (Böcklin), and The Shore of Oblivion (Bracht). Each one is thrown at the player, obtuse and pernicious. And yet the lacerating effect of this, the shifting perspectives, the jarring cutscenes allows a recognition of the repeated structures undergirding. A thousand bodies cushioning a landing in an elevator shaft, the game is built out of repetition and parallels. The laboured grasping through metal halls is remade in these disruptions – or perhaps remade because of its disruptiveness – allowing for an art which attempts to shake an understanding of it as whole.

To secure this, the physicality of SIGNALIS’ world dissolves, achieved through flickering in and out of art-styles and aesthetics and location – [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]. Ariane repeats in Alina, intensities re-iterating within a realm of un-actualised existence. Falke and Ariane and Alina, Elster and Elster and Elster; multiplicities from which are differentiated the same principle, each one a terrible death, each one a painful birth. Obvious differences only serve to contour the repetition itself, an incision in the whole. Messages sent, repeated, received through four different languages. Each character is exposed as pure becoming, death encountered in the unconscious of life, a complete destabilisation of the singular identity, reconstructed only through the teeth of each other. Repeated virtualities are present in actualisation, the devotion for one and another, the relationship of each serving to shape an undetermined Idea that exists behind all of them, present through mirrored scenes, and yet all reciprocally entangled; self-referentiality which cannot be severed. The stylistic flare – poses imitated in cuts, traced scenes from Ghost in the Shell, a 5/8 motif seeping in, The Isle of the Dead and The Shore of Oblivion – becomes obvious, each serving not to show similarities between the two but differences in the whole via disruption. And what is this all in service of? Simply put, a-normative Queer love (Queer as other, Queer as wrong).

What is actually gained from this reading, however? What new is formed? It can transubstantiate away confusion to a baseline solidity, explain the impenetrability of the text as ‘actually that’s the whole point’ in a twist which can only be seen as self-righteously hipster-esque. My intent is moreso an understanding of the game as Queer (interfering), first and foremost. Blind devotion entwined with constant undercutting of the Actual challenges our pre-held notion of the Real - all that is solid melts into air. Set-dressing here is made to focus this idea; a vapid gesticulation towards authoritarian systems as shorthand for rigid absoluteness is merely a way for the Queer to break through in fleshy contortion. And, as Elster on the Penrose, perceived wholeness melts away in the exposure of the brutal alterity of art. The shredding of textual membranes within SIGNALIS forces the player to confront the indigestible, to re-align oneself, where one cannot understand it merely by grasping the whole, but instead through tracing the relation between repeated elements. Put simply, the deep-rooted un-intelligibility of disparate, colliding slices allows for a prioritisation of foreign intensities, and thus the encounter with a radical Other.

For this is something I have not touched on. The interminable project of all French philosophers rears its head once again; an absence, an unfinished question within Deleuze’s project. The Self/Other and real interaction with alterity is left absent, or open. Interpretations of Deleuze agree that he tends towards a structure for an ethical system: do not ‘explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other too much'. Express your singularity, replay the events that make and unmake you, experiment with others through creative destruction. SIGNALIS should be understood as an attempt of Deleuzian ethics, between the game and the player, between the relations of art, between the self and its repetitions. Each artifact is thus a fracture of art, tearing the smooth skin of our attention, an attempt to facilitate radical divergences, rekindling relations, forcing them more strange, more obscure, more unsettling. An otherness that always introduces new intensity, that disfigures and removes; Ariane to Elster.

Love driven from/by destructive (creative) need, an otherness which rips apart and claws back together. I miss it.


Works Cited
Böcklin, A. (1880). Isle of the Dead: Basel. Oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.
Böcklin, A. (1880). Isle of the Dead: New York. Oil on board. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Böcklin, A. (1883). Isle of the Dead: Third Version. Oil on board. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Böcklin, A. (1886). Isle of the Dead: Fifth Version. Oil on board. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
Barnard, N., Moore, R., & Lace, I. (2010, March 10). Comparative reviews of 10 unidentified performances of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead by three MusicWeb reviewers. Retrieved from MusicWeb International: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Mar10/Isle_of_the_dead_composite.htm
Bracht, E. (1889). The Shore of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Darmstadt.
Bracht, E. (1911). The Shore of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster.
Chambers, R. W. (2017). The King in Yellow. London: Pushkin Press.
Chopin, F. (1971). Prelude Op.28 No.15 [Performed by V. Horowitz]. New York City, New York, USA.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Athlone Press Limited.
Hubert, L. (2004). Arnold Böcklin: Die Toteninsel. Traumbild des 19. Jahrhunderts. Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter, 71.
Meier, G. (2011). Isle of the Dead. Dalkey Archive Press.
Rachmaninoff, S. (1929). Isle of the Dead [Performed by S. Rachmaninoff & Philadelphia Orchestra]. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Rachmaninoff, S. (1999). Isle of the Dead [Performed by Y. Svetlanov & BBC Symphony Orchestra]. London, UK.
Rachmaninoff, S. (2012). Isle of the Dead [Performed by M. Pletnev & Russian National Orchestra]. Moscow, Russia.
rose-engine. (2022, October 27). SIGNALIS. Humble Games.
Schubert, F. (2005). Ständchen D957 [Performed by A. Gastinel, & C. Désert]. Paris, France.
Cicada Sirens, 1000 Eyes , & Schley, T. (2023). SIGNALIS (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK).
Somers-Halls, H. (2013). Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tchaikovsky, P. I. (1984). Swan lake, ballet suite, Op 20: I: Lake in the Moonlight [Performed by M. Rostropovich & Berlin Philharmoniker,]. Berlin, Germany.
Williams, J. (2013). Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition a Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Not a massive of the taditional CRPG genre, but this really does it for me. The party interactions, the roleplaying opportunities, the interconnecting systems; I'm about 45 hours in (restarted twice) and only gotten to the start of the third act (of five, and I think the first two are on the shorter sides). There's also some excellent voice acting, making what would be a usually quite generic band of companions ooze personality. The writing does fall short of fantastic sometimes, and at times it feels a little clunky, but I think that's to be quite expected with this many interlocking systems. My main caveat has to be that you are going to be worse at this game than you think - the harder modes are meant for people who are intimatley familiar with Pathfinder. The ability to personalise it really helps in this regard.

2/4 endings, can be a wonderful insight into the world and introduction before attempting the game proper. It gives a much more open look at an idea of the Bachelor's route than either Pathologic 2 or Pathologic 1 allowed - the variance is stark compared to what we know to happen in either, and I found it very intriguing exploring that. Overall, I loved it - what I wouldn't give to spend another minute with the smell of twyrine and the earth biting my heels - but at points it didn't feel like I was the Bachelor; there was no distinguishing feature outside of being set in the Stone Yard from this to the base game, and taking it as something in its own right (not just a thing in attachment to the Main Performance), it feels as if it fails to allow the personality of Dankovsky to really drip through. It's probably simply a matter of the length, but again, this is me taking it as a full product In Itself - not the free DLC it is presented as. As that, it is wonderful; a small snippet into a way that could be, a day that never ends, a few hours of eternity.

My fifth game in the trek through the Yoko Taro gameography. The music was excellent, as one would expect of Keiichi Okabe, and I loved the presentation of it. The characters where fleshed out enough to be entertaining and their interactions where fun, although slightly generically in line with Yoko's other works, and it worked surprisingly well for a game with only a single narrator - I thought it would grate on me, yet it felt far more relaxing than I had expected.
It was definitely the worst Yoko game I've played so far - or maybe the one with the least impact - but it was certainly enjoyable. I do not think that this style of game is for me particularly, having never been one for D&D styles.

For me, Gris was simply the right game at the right time. I picked it up near Christmas in 2018, at one of my lowest points, and I fell in love with it from its starting scene. It's watercolour palette and the use of the orchestra alongside the main voices and sparing use of organs stole me away, and I haven't looked back.

A lot of these reviews on this site critique its mechanical depth and how one dimensional it can be at times, but would it really have made it better? The fundamental misunderstanding, I feel, is that this isn't a platformer with nice music and art, it's designed to be centred around the synthesis of the art and music into a singular sublime experience - the platforming is simply a way to move through that. When I see the discussion on this subject, I ask myself "would this game be better with something like Celeste's focus on execution?" and I find myself always coming to a resounding no; a complex mechanical system would take focus away from what I think the game was supposed to truly be about.

On the subject of this ostentatiously named "singular sublime experience", I think it is rather wonderful. I've never really had a game which made me feel quite as Gris does, without the use of any real characters to speak of. It's somewhat heavy handed messaging on the five stages of grief and working through depression by the titular Gris is all too familiar and while the story treads a beaten path, the way it was told is unique to this game, using almost exclusivley the soundtrack and the art to tell it. I adored this, and I can understand why it's divisive - you either love it or find it dull as hell.

Personally for me, Gris is a game I've kept close to my heart nearing 4 years. I replay it every now and again, just to hear the starting song (Gris, Pt 1) as the title card is unveiled, or Perseverance match with the sandstorms' heights, Unagi in underwater caverns (yes I know the names of the OST songs shut up). Its undoubtedly my favourite game, but by far not the best I've played.

This is probably the game I reflect the most on. It's the game I use as a yardstick for all others, in hopes one day I might find a game which succeeds it.

You've probably heard this game from one of several youtube videos about it, but those aren't the full picture - none of them are close to it in my eyes, because nothing can convey how you will feel in this game - a subjective fever dream, one which feels lucid enough to remember the details of, but always feeling like you missed something in the act of remembering.

What really sells this feeling is the simple act of walking. Going through the town, the hum of the music, in between rows of houses which look simultaneously bland and something never seen in this world, going past people which all look the same, sells this fever dream/nightmare in a way that no other game has been able to; its successor opts for greater mechanical depth rather than an elusive idea like this. The few buildings which seem to have any kind of identity loom over the town, impossible in design, function and aesthetic, and these edifices seem to be designed for humans as only an afterthought. This contrast of the blandness and the miraculous is what makes the Town on the River Gorkhon have its specific allure.

The identity of the factions and the conflicts between them is something to behold; the kin and the town, the Inquisitor and the General, the Kaines and Olgimskys and Saburovs. All of them have their own beliefs and each of them are principled and, most importantly, none of them are wrong, per-se. The friction between these factions, and how you approach them and interact within them is something which very much makes the game for me; all of them are right, and wrong, and only by playing through again and again do you ever glimpse the full perspective.

Pathologic's real glory is in the writing of each character; I shall not spoil it here, but I remember every character and there is still much to each one I don't understand, or cannot. The writing of the dialogue, like the world, is made in riddles and seemingly nonsensical, but somehow the idea of it still shines through. Perhaps yes, the characters each sound like they are puppets for the developers' bar philosophy, but I think that adds only to the unique charm of it all - the characters stand in the same spot every day, staring and waiting for you to arrive, and you'd want them to be as if human? Instead, they lean into this un-naturalism, and for that I adore it.

I think that the first line of this review shows the futility of it; I cannot chain the miracle to this world. The subjectivity of the game is what makes it great, the playing of the game more than anything else. How you relate to the characters and feel about the world, how you talk and walk through the town is what makes it so special.

By far and away the best RPG of this style that I've ever played. The world, the lore, the characters, the way that exploration can be really hard at times - it made it feel far larger than it ever actually was. I haven't completed this even though I've sunk well over a hundred hours into both modding and playing it. The exploration of Skyrim is present and perhaps better, with each journey revealing more of the map and a greater reliance on identifying objects, but the individual stories are also there, something that Skyrim always failed to sell properly. The freedom of it all, but also the depth of each space discovered and the stories within it, is wonderful. It can be an old and clunky game; a common complaint is the levelling system, or how badly it can lag in situations, or how many loading screens there can be, but it's never bothered me too much. The world feels so much more vibrant than almost any other open world I've ever played.