The Grief of Signalis
This was originally a reply to a friend on a forum, but I decided to make it a post here. There are unmarked spoilers throughout, so be wary if you haven’t played. I love Signalis a lot!
Survival horror is, to me, a frustrating genre. So much of it is cheap, built on the backs of titles now 20, 30 years old. Many use these old tropes and mechanics to evoke feelings of nostalgia, without really understanding why they were used originally. Features are imported wholesale, given a fresh coat of paint, but their antecedents were born out of hardware limitations that no longer exist. What new innovations we get, through titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Alien: Isolation, P.T. (all of those over a decade old, yeesh) are quickly copied.
Signalis does not reinvent survival horror. It is not this great breath of fresh air, totally innovative and new. It is steeped in the past; Resident Evil by way of mechanics, Silent Hill by way of aesthetic. But it is, as you said, pure. It does not aim to reinvent the genre, because it is perhaps the purest expression of it. The only game I can think of, off the top of my head, with a similar vibe is Silent Hill 2. Oft praised, endlessly copied, but Signalis is perhaps the first game since its release over two decades ago that truly iterates on its theme.
Because Signalis is about grief. Yearning. The self-destructive tendency to reclaim what you’ve lost, even though it will never be as good as it once was. Even if it was never good to begin with. It is maybe the most emotional game I’ve ever played. I don’t think anything has ever touched me quite like Signalis has. Every single facet of it reinforces this central theme, an unshakeable foundation, an unstoppable cycle.
Yes, Signalis is not a particularly novel game, in terms of its gameplay. The Rule of Six inventory limit is diagetic, but is itself a thin excuse to evoke the limited options of classic Resident Evil.
That it goes to this length, at all, to explain itself is commendable. Most games would list the Resident Evil inventory management as a feature on the store blurb and leave it at that. Signalis goes a little bit further, and the dedication is lovely.
Moving onto the oppressive mood, punishing and stressful. I replayed the game earlier this year for the secret ending (which I highly recommend after clearing the game once normally, though you WILL need a guide), and decided to play on the hardest difficulty.
It was pretty hard! I died constantly, I scrounged for supplies and ran past Replikas in ways I’d never had to in other games. Many times I thought of just giving up and restarting on normal, because I’d never had this much trouble on that difficulty.
Then, as I blundered around Nowhere (the Otherworld body horror segment of the game, connecting the Sierpinski and Vineta areas), I realized something.
This was what it was like for Elster, wasn’t it? This was an echo of her own struggle, endlessly trying to return to Ariane, to fulfill her promise against impossible odds. Every repair kit, every bullet, was essential, not to be wasted. Elster spent most of that run hurt, clutching her side, vision glitching and fading at the edges, but still she pressed on. Still I strove to give her the ending we both so desperately wanted.
It’s rare that a game can put me in the mindset of its central characters. Through the hardship, I understood in a small way what it was to be her, lonely and forlorn, a wraith haunting a ruined star system. One shell among endless copies, refracted through time. A lost, forgotten yearning her only solace. It’s incredibly sad. I’m tearing up writing this, thinking of her, of those halcyon days on the Penrose-512, before it all went bad.
That later segment, when you read the message the Nation sent on Cycle 3000, when you learn that everything, this entire game, was built on a cruel lie. The second time through, I didn’t feel the shock Elster and Ariane did, as I did the first playthrough. I felt anger, hatred at this fictional nation, and how strange that was.
So much of this setting is fascinating to me. I adore the Replikas, their designs, how the game hints that, while every Replika of a particular make stems from the same Gestalt neural pattern, not every Replika is the same. They’re all variations on a theme. LSTRs are all taciturn and introverted, but none of them are like Elster-512. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, I love them all dearly. FKLRs are perhaps the most aesthetically-appealing to me, but Elster’s my favorite.
When you start the game, when you see her as she boots up. Her face is neutral, calm, but so very, very tired. Every part of her is grief, but she’ll keep doing this over and over, forever.
Lest we also forget, the STAR/EULR couple seen a couple times in the game are beautifully tragic. I adore them.
It’s stated in ADLR’s journal that the setting is steeped in an endless cycle, that everything repeats. The normal endings you get (my first playthrough resulted in the Promise ending) is merely the end of one cycle, only for another to start when you start a new file. It’s remarkably bleak, but again, there’s your diagesis. Arguably the secret ending is the only one to break the cycle, and is by far the most ambiguous one. That it requires outside knowledge of the game, I believe people only discovered it through datamining and hints from the devs, speaks again to diagesis. It just keeps happening!
And, yes, so much of Signalis is steeped in metaphor, layers and layers to pick apart. Every first-person segment, every quick flash of text, standing on an otherworldly beach, staring up at a black void of a sky. That, at the very beginning of the game, you crawl through a hole to reach a lonely, cramped radio room, and begin the game pulling a book off the shelf. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, immediately setting the vibe that we’re gonna get into some weird cosmic horror shit.
There’s so much to pick apart here. People have picked it apart, the wiki is a lovely resource, as is the Discord. There’s musing on repeating cycles of grief, non-Euclidean reality warping, that Ariane is a reincarnation of the presumed-dead Grand Empress, once ruler of humanity. Bioresonance, a signal of grief and rage and love throughout the stars, Ariane’s pod as a chrysalis for a greater form of existence. I fucking love this kind of analysis, and Signalis has wrapped me around itself so deeply that I can’t help but immerse myself in it.
On that note, arainydancer’s shorts are required watching.
If you’re of a fanfic inclination, here are some of my favorites. Some of these are some of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read, even apart from fanfic.
- Die Malerin
- Spider//Lily
- 52/60 (very NSFW)
- Make it Last Forever
These next two are intended as a sequel to the secret ending, so you might want to look at that first before reading. They’re also in a mini-continuity with “Die Malerin” above.
- The Herald and Her Knight
- The Knight Errant (Sequel to Herald)
I haven’t started this one yet, but I hear it’s also highly regarded: A Waltz for the Void