The main thing that sold me on Signalis was the presentation and beyond some occasionally pretentious moments ("this space intentionally left blank" cmon now) it does really hold up.

Signalis' core gameplay loop revolves around getting key items to unlock rooms with yet more key items to unlock even more rooms etc. and while that does get somewhat stale, the bigger issue is the honestly pointless 5 item inventory restriction which doesn't accomplish anything other than getting you to run back to the save-room and dump some key items/ammo to make space for more items or retrieve key items when you need them. There's no strategic inventory management or anything, it's just kinda annoying. The exploration is also pretty bland, there's no real secrets or anything else to find and a lot of the areas look very samey.
The puzzles, however, are super creative and were probably the highlight of the game.

The combat is not very fun either, it's really simplistic in terms of interactions and the enemy AI feels kinda crappy/inconsistent in regards to player detection and path finding. Another issue is that when you re-enter a room, an enemy can be right on top of the door you just entered through making you take unavoidable damage.
Towards the end of the game, as rooms started to have higher enemy density, I bumped the difficulty down so I could just sprint through because it was getting downright tedious to play.

Regarding the story, Signalis' opening hours set up this really cool mysterious universe but the mysteries are never really expanded upon and so much of the narrative is "left open to interpretation" that even at the end of the game, barely anything is known about anyone, anything or what is actually happening. The game tries to go for some emotional trauma character driven story but that doesn't really work out when you don't know anything about the characters or what they're even trying to do.

Signalis ends up being a superficial survival horror game with some cool visuals that's lackluster in every other aspect.

a melancholic wound which bleeds for the virtue of creativity, unfortunately — ironically — weighed down by the influence of its inspirations so much that it's afraid to be itself. each new callback feels like a shopping list of narrative elements, tropes or imagery utilised with no sense other than "we also enjoyed [media property]"; it stops eliciting a simple eyeroll and crosses into absurdity when symbolism lifted wholesale from other titles is transplanted for extremely pivotal moments or scenes.

to speak to its strengths, Signalis maintains a highly unique visual language and style across 3d and 2d artistic assets as well as its tactile UI and graphic design. the sleek utilitarian replikas vs the rosy warmth of the gestalts is rendered skillfully with a mere pixel monopen, their representative polygonal forms surprisingly expressive in their minimalistic textures and animations. the accompanying score is also something really special, particularly the piano arrangements which command this epic sadness matched by the tale of Elster and her beloved. i only wish so much attention was given to navigating the game itself as it remains a glorified note hunt segmented by barely responsive doors, with combat feeling more a universal frustrating necessity enforced by the label "survival horror" than anything tense or scary.

like a lot of these gorgeously stylised and well-loved indies, i really did want to love Signalis as its themes and genre are among my favourites along with the recommendation from a few good friends. either way i'm glad to have finally played it despite my own average reception and am inspired by its longing viscera and heartache.

This game deserves proper critique as much as it deserves its praise.

Gameplay is poorly designed. Ammo, inventory space, level design and respawning enemies are all SUFFOCATING. These elements don't work well together and just frustrate you.
Signalis just poorly replicates old mechanics, while forgetting why these elements worked in the first place. Most ps1 RE games had 8-slots inventory while Signalis tightens it to 6, but also constantly drops at you quest items(Like Silent Hill did) that are far more common than in RE. Because of that backtracking reaches insane levels of tedium. Add to that tight corridors filled with enemies that will respawn later on and it becomes even worse. I had far more fun with majority of psx survival horrors despite them being 20 years older than Signalis.

But despite all of that you can swallow it up and gameplay, while annoying, still will be... serviceable. After all, game tries to be story focused. But story isn't that good either.

Remember principle of "Show, not tell" technique? Well, Signalis OVERuses and UNDERuses it at the same time. Let me explain, there's two primary sources of storytelling in Signalis:
1. Vivid dreamy incomprehensible cutscenes with hundred hidden meanings
2. Ten thousand notes and journals that just infodump on you everything with no context.

Remember Silent "two hour videoessay" Hill 2? People keep analyzing it decades after, I know comparing Signalis to THE Silent Hill 2 is unfair, but the story is simple and perfectly comprehensible without German/Chinese knowledge and reading King in Yellow. Silent Hill KNOWS when to be subtle and when to be blatant. Good luck with understanding Signalis though, because game just tells you to screw yourself and figure everything out by yourself.

Story itself isn't bad, but the game is AFRAID to tell you anything. It comes off as pretentious 2deep4u Evangelion wannabe, instead of presenting cohesive storytelling. It's just blueballing you with introducing a lot of cool stuff like replikas' past lives or cosmic horror, but doesn't provide any fricking answer, all is left is fans' theories. Hell, you won't even know why you ended up at Sierpinski in the first place!!!

The game has positive sides, like outstanding art direction or unique lore, but people just straight up ignore fundamental problems that prevent it from being "instant classic" or "greatest silent hill game since silent hill 3". But ig because lesbian representation is so rare, people treat it like angel simply because it has WLW story(Which is thankfully executed really damn well, but introduced WAY TOO LATE).

I really wanted to love this game. Sadly, I couldn't.