Signalis

In the busy autumn season, when AAA titles compete to shout the loudest, we sometimes overlook smaller but equally exciting titles. SIGNALIS from German two-man team rose-engine, with its obvious love of PlayStation 1 era survival horror titles, was on my radar, but rats, Norse gods and an invasion from outer space contributed to me only now exploring the Sierpinski base's retro-futuristic spaces and hallways. And while a review here some two months after release may seem a bit stale, it's a "better late than never scenario", because SIGNALIS is both a beautiful and twisted love letter to a past it rarely gets locked out of, and an incredibly stylish descent into a cosmic nightmare I never wanted to wake up from.

At first glance SIGNALIS, with its mix of low poly and prerendered environments, looks like an entirely classic take on the early Resident Evil and Silent Hill titles, but it's not many minutes before Rose Engine's impeccable stylistic sense shows its face. The Sierpinksi base is kept in a dark colour palette filled with shades of grey and brown, but the classic third-person exploration is often broken up by shifts to first-person as you investigate key locations like lifts, televisions and communication relays. Here, the prerendered images really flesh out the detailed retro-futuristic world. It's a trick the Resident Evil games also mastered, but Rose Engine goes the extra mile by introducing longer sequences in first person. And then there are the cutscenes, which with their sharp edges and striking use of red, for example, look quite different from the rest of the game. Along with frequent use of stylized title cards that introduce new chapters or special rooms, they give SIGNALIS a visual look unlike any other game I can recall. It's flagrant and eclectic in some ways, but rose-engine seems so confident in the way they juggle the different styles that the end result appears completely cohesive.

Fortunately, behind the impeccable presentation beats a heart that is both narratively and mechanically strong. The former especially channels Silent Hill, with its ambiguous relationship to reality and a missing girlfriend, but it never feels copied. That's partly due to the setting - the aforementioned Sierpinski base - which, with its location on the edge of the solar system and retro-futuristic interior, is a far cry from the silent city. The same can be said of the Replicas who make up the bulk of the game's cast. Artificial intelligences modelled after real flesh-and-blood humans. You're one yourself, and it's your search for your girlfriend Alina that has brought you to the Sierpinski base, where you're a stranger to most.

As a location, Sierpinski is perfectly suited for this type of methodical survival horror. A jumble of times that seems to continue right down to the planet's core and the unspeakable things that must hide in the depths. You start at the top and through exploration, combat and walking slowly move downwards in your search for answers. SIGNALIS revels in the unknown and the ambiguous, but you always feel that you have a clear purpose, even when everything around you is open to interpretation. As is usually the case with good psychological horror, there's an emotional core driving you forward - just think of James Sunderland's search for answers in Silent Hill 2. In SIGNALIS it's the relationship with your missing girlfriend, a relationship whose nature and circumstances are constantly up for negotiation through new revelations.

Around the central relationship, Rose-engine builds an impressively well-crafted world through journals, diaries, propaganda posters and something as dry as instruction manuals. And our two central characters are flanked by secondary characters with fully rounded story arcs. I actually think SIGNALIS' story would have worked just fine with a less detailed universe, but the incredible sense of place the game has is undoubtedly enhanced by the amount of detail. I may not need to know what it's like to live on all of the fictional solar system's planets and colonies, but that's why I still read about it with great curiosity.

All in all, it is a great pleasure to explore the world of SIGNALIS. The game largely borrows its structure from Resident Evil 2 in particular, with its few, large areas consisting of a myriad of rooms and hallways. Each area is like a jigsaw puzzle where you have to get everything to fit together properly, but once you've moved on to the next, the slate is wiped clean - though you keep your usable items, of course. The puzzles range from the straightforward to the more complex, where you need to connect information from several different locations. One of my favourites was rummaging through medical records to find a social security number that I'd read in an email was supposed to be the code to a lock somewhere else in the area. Some of the more esoteric puzzles involve tuning a radio to the right frequencies to produce particular patterns you then have to identify around the environment, but even in these moments SIGNALIS strikes a fine balance between challenging your little greys without becoming too abstract or disjointed. This is largely due to the incredibly useful map, which conveniently marks particularly interesting locations and colour codes doors according to whether they're open, can be opened with a key or similar, or are inaccessible altogether. A great example of a quality of life improvement that helps bring the genre into the modern age without compromising its spirit.

However, as the sources of inspiration suggest, you don't get to solve Sierpinski's puzzles at your leisure. A mysterious disease has struck the base's inhabitants, turning them into twisted lumps of flesh with an acute urge to murder. SIGNALIS' enemies come in a handful of different variations of the same type, which can be dispatched with a handful of the most obvious firearms such as a pistol, shotgun, revolver and grenade launcher. Unlike the sources of inspiration, you don't have to worry about aiming up or down, just make sure you aim at the enemy for long enough to hit effectively. It's a functional if unspectacular system, and often it pays to go for broke especially since the termite that makes enemies stay down forever is in short supply. Resource management in particular plays a major role and ends up as a double-edged sword. At its best, this aspect forces you to consider what you really need on your journey, but in SIGNALIS it's so restrictive that it's often necessary to return to the nearest chest or reload your last saved game to get the right key item in. In the game's early areas, where progression is more linear, this isn't a major problem, but towards the end, where SIGNALIS opens up considerably more, it's a real nuisance.

The above is far from enough to dampen my enthusiasm for Rose Engine's debut title, however. With its superior presentation, robust gameplay and ambiguous, emotional and multi-layered narrative, SIGNALIS is one of the greatest gaming experiences I've had the pleasure of this year. It was the presentation that attracted my attention, the gameplay that held it, but it's the story that cements my love for SIGNALIS, and makes it my favorite indie of the past year.