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Signalis (space survival horror) - update: mod that expands inventory to 8 slots released (PC version only)


Bloodporne

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  • 2 years later...
  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Signalis (space survival horror) to release on 27 October 2022 for XB1/Game Pass/PS4/Switch/PC
  • 4 months later...

@Bloodporne

 

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WWW.PCGAMER.COM

Space survival horror that seems familiar, until it surprises you.

 

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Signalis’ intentional ambiguity kept me anxious all the time. Don’t expect easy exposition: Signalis is dreamlike, often skipping ahead, leaving the player to figure out how much time has passed. First-person 3D flashback sequences further jumble the timeline, impossible scenes interspersed with more plausible memories. While your mission is always simple—a downward spiral in search of a missing person—many of the finer points are left up to interpretation.


My complaints with Signalis begin and end with inventory management. Elster has a six-slot inventory. Unfortunately, one gun and a box of ammo are two items. Add healing items for three. One defensive item makes four. There’s a flashlight (for dark rooms) and a camera (for visual notes of puzzle hints) as well, and that’s before you need to carry a single puzzle key-item. Needless to say, I was backtracking to storage chests frequently. Just one extra slot (or letting me permanently equip the torch and camera) would have solved 80% of my inventory woes.

 

But that’s it for complaints. I’d love to talk more about the story and its world, but I don’t want to spoil any surprises. Signalis launches on October 27th, and will also be on Game Pass, and I cannot wait to talk with the Silent Hill crowd about Elster's fractured memories. Signalis feels like a game I’ll be thinking about and remembering (however hazily) for a long time.

 

 

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We've got another new preview @Bloodporne

 

SIGNALIS-Penrose-1.png
BLOODY-DISGUSTING.COM

"I'm often a bit unsure if we really made a horror game at all," Yuri Stern tells me. Stern is one-half of the German studio rose-engine, and the

 

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There’s a lot more I’d like to say about Signalis‘s story, but even vague spoilers (up to and including the name of the mining colony) would rob it of some of its impact. As I’m writing this, I cleared my first run through the game over a week ago, and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since. It’s a dense, sprawling narrative, which tries to build a world and society around you on the fly, and much of the story has been deliberately left up to the player’s interpretation.

 

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9 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

We've got another new preview @Bloodporne

 

SIGNALIS-Penrose-1.png
BLOODY-DISGUSTING.COM

"I'm often a bit unsure if we really made a horror game at all," Yuri Stern tells me. Stern is one-half of the German studio rose-engine, and the

 

 

Yeah unless it reviews terribly across the board, I'm buying it either way. No spoilaz 4 me!!!

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Game Information

Game Title: Signalis

 

Platforms:

  • Xbox Series X/S (Oct 27, 2022)
  • PlayStation 5 (Oct 27, 2022)
  • Xbox One (Oct 27, 2022)
  • Nintendo Switch (Oct 27, 2022)
  • PlayStation 4 (Oct 27, 2022)
  • PC (Oct 27, 2022)


Developer: rose-engine

Publisher: Humble Games

 

Review Aggregator:

OpenCritic - 79 average - 85% recommended

 

Critic Reviews

Destructoid - 9.5 / 10

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A hallmark of excellence. There may be flaws, but they are negligible and won't cause massive damage.


PlayStation Universe - 9 / 10

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Signalis is a brooding, atmospheric slice of survival horror that unfurls its dread in a slow, tantalizing manner. Its bleak retrotech world is a fine backdrop for the disturbing mysteries that must be uncovered in the frozen wastes of an ice planet.


GameBlast - Portuguese - 8.5 / 10

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Effectively executing all the classic techniques that made the genre popular, but with its own creative storytelling, SIGNALIS is set to be a horror fan favorite for this October, or even long term. Being a solid game, it's hard to point out too many flaws in the experience.


IGN Italy - Italian - 8.4 / 10

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A love letter to horror that was perhaps not suitable for anyone but, precisely for this reason, to be devoured in one go if you like the genre.


GameSpot - 8 / 10

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Signalis is a nostalgic haunt that knows exactly where it came from but still dares to forge ahead, too.


God is a Geek - 8 / 10

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Signalis offers an incredible story with a terrifying atmosphere that is just as much about your surroundings as it is about the creatures.


Hardcore Gamer - 4 / 5

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While Signalis won't be leading to a full-on fifth-gen survival horror renaissance, if only because some of the genre's past sins still linger, it still delivers an enjoyable adventure that perfectly captures the feel of the classic era while also doubling down on more detailed cosmic horrors and twisted visuals, capped off with some sturdy combat and impressive puzzle design.


Metro GameCentral - 8 / 10

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A stylish replication of survival horror's roots, which manages to capture and refresh the unsettling horrors of the genre's 90s origins.


Push Square - 8 / 10

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All in all, this is an astoundingly stylish effort from such a small studio. Signalis is riveting in both the construction of its world and the tense survival horror gameplay it executes so well. Don’t overlook it because of its very late last-gen release: rose-engine’s effort has its feet firmly planted in the future.


Spaziogames - Italian - 8 / 10

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Signalis is a true retro survival horror with a unique visual style and a compelling story.


GameGrin - 6.5 / 10

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I can confidently recommend SIGNALIS for its puzzle element, but its combat, inventory, and sound design manage to bog it down to a merely okay title.


GamesRadar+ - 3 / 5

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Signalis conjures a memorable retro-futuristic vibe with its art design, matched with a story that explores the terrifying extremes of sentient life. But its Resident Evil inspired systems feel overly mechanical and fail to produce tension, draining energy from a potentially chilling scenario.


Eurogamer - Essential

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A sapphic, sci-fi fever dream that finds horror and beauty among the stars, Signalis is dense and alluring to the last.


Polygon - Unscored

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Signalis is a game that asks you to repeatedly plunge yourself into the abyss and face what meets you there. Those willing to look beyond its occasional nagging pain points and homage-laden surface will find a surprisingly intimate take on cosmic horror, one which beckons the player to consider, again and again and again, the question of what truly makes a person who they are, and just how far are they willing to go to keep a promise to a friend.


Washington Post - Unscored

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In engaging with the story’s opaque and contradictory surfaces, one may flail about, tentatively reaching for this or that hypothesis. But if the game wants to get nuts, let’s get nuts. Maybe Ariane is somehow adrift in her own dream, in which her subconscious is drawing from the tyranny of the Eusan regime and from Ariane’s personal torments, which are adumbrated in notes and cutscenes. Elster may be a dreamed-up figment after all, a conduit for Ariane’s vague psychic baggage, whereas Ariane may herself be subject to the dreams of a less discernible entity (“the red eye beyond the gate”). In any event, Elster and Ariane seem to be searching for each other, and for some mystical escape hatch — a means of jettisoning their dismal surroundings. They do not wish to die, but they long to see beyond the veil, and to answer at last some dimly perceived wake-up call.

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Signalis (space survival horror) to release on 27 October 2022 for PC/Xbox/Game Pass/PlayStation/Switch - reviews from OpenCritic posted
On 10/29/2022 at 12:05 PM, Paperclyp said:

Anyone playing this? I am quite tempted to pick it up, looks awesome. 

I just played for an hour and a half and so far this is REALLY good. I mean if you want early Resi, Silent Hill style survival horror, this is 100% that with a few really nice, modern touches in the stew and its own ideas. It doesn't feel like a simple clone.

 

And I will say this game looks, and sounds, phenomenal. It's almost like if the first Metal Gear Solid looked how nostalgia paints it in my head. There are frequent first person kind "detective" views to solve puzzles and it just looks SO good. Something about the whole vibe just is a big fuck yea from me.

 

So far, it does what it wants to do incredibly well. If you want PS1 style survival horror, get it. Unless it takes a major dump, this is awesome. The intro segment and game title drop alone was pure gold.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/30/2022 at 7:33 PM, Bloodporne said:

I just played for an hour and a half and so far this is REALLY good. I mean if you want early Resi, Silent Hill style survival horror, this is 100% that with a few really nice, modern touches in the stew and its own ideas. It doesn't feel like a simple clone.

 

And I will say this game looks, and sounds, phenomenal. It's almost like if the first Metal Gear Solid looked how nostalgia paints it in my head. There are frequent first person kind "detective" views to solve puzzles and it just looks SO good. Something about the whole vibe just is a big fuck yea from me.

 

So far, it does what it wants to do incredibly well. If you want PS1 style survival horror, get it. Unless it takes a major dump, this is awesome. The intro segment and game title drop alone was pure gold.

Just take the debit card out of my wallet next time 

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12 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

I'd just like to say that this game could very well supplant Norco as my personal 2022 GOTY!

 

24 minutes ago, eventide11 said:

Just take the debit card out of my wallet next time 

It's VERY good. I have a few gripes with it but man, it's so well done and exactly the game everyone's been crying for in regards to Survival Horror in my opinion. 

 

I came to realize one of the things it nails the hardest actually is the whole pathfinding puzzle aspect and how the very limited inventory space and resources create that organically. I found myself falling naturally into that RE1/RE2 rhythm of essentially going on "runs" from the safe room. Empty inventory, load up my offensive items, review the map and come up with a critical path and go clear it. Return to safe room, unload weaponry, go tackle item pickups and puzzles and so on. It does a very good job with that and most things calling themselves Survival Horror miss that crucial element. 

 

Also, my gripes kind of dissipate when I remember this entire game was made by two people. If you told me this was some lost PS1 "classic era" game running on an emulator, I'd believe it. 

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Will probably get overlooked because it's not GOW but... Wow. Only about an hour in but.. Wow. The game is incredible. Took me allll the way back to what I liked about survival horror and is giving me Silent Hill, Metroid, RE and Metal Gear vibes. This is an excellent game to play if you're trying to wait on GOW for whatever reason. Music, presentation, atmosphere, menus, story, visuals.. They nailed it. These guys really get it when it comes to a game like this. Really looking forward to what they do in the future. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Much to its credit, this game forced me to do something that I haven't done while playing a game for a very, very long time:


Break out the good ol' pencil n' paper to actually solve puzzles!  That was such a wonderfully fantastic feeling of nostalgia!

 

Also, I decided to go down the rabbit hole of how others are analyzing/interpreting the game's extremely esoteric story and man oh man, the interpretations definitely go places! 

 

Steam Community post:

 

Spoiler
?imw=512&imh=512&ima=fit&impolicy=Letter
STEAMCOMMUNITY.COM

Attempting to puzzle out the different endings for Signalis...

 

 

 

Reddit posts:
 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

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47 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Break out the good ol' pencil n' paper to actually solve puzzles!  That was such a wonderfully fantastic feeling of nostalgia!

 

Myst including a journal for written notes was one of the most magical feelings for me as a kid. No one does this anymore or really since.

 

417oRwvfeqL._SR600,315_PIWhiteStrip,Bott

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On 11/12/2022 at 12:27 PM, eventide11 said:

Will probably get overlooked because it's not GOW but... Wow. Only about an hour in but.. Wow. The game is incredible. Took me allll the way back to what I liked about survival horror and is giving me Silent Hill, Metroid, RE and Metal Gear vibes. This is an excellent game to play if you're trying to wait on GOW for whatever reason. Music, presentation, atmosphere, menus, story, visuals.. They nailed it. These guys really get it when it comes to a game like this. Really looking forward to what they do in the future. 

 

I have to check this out! 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I’m a couple hours into this, and it seems like a very stylish entry in a sub-genre of games that I find just exhausting to play, and not necessarily in a good way. Solve a puzzle to get a key to open a door to find another key to another door with another puzzle to open a box, get a key to open another thing… Give me a shotgun, but so few shells it feels bad every time I use it. Give me a bunch of stuff to pick up, but so few inventory slots I have to keep running back to storage. I really like the overall vibe, but I’m really struggling with the part where you actually play it. 

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Really not digging the art style. Not so much the PS1 aesthetic, but the perspective is completely fucked. Floor tiles have no perspective so you can't tell what's flat on the ground and what's vertical. The floor looks like the wall, which looks like the ladder, which looks like the door, etc.

 

Not sure if that was intentional but I don't like wandering for ten minutes only to realize the thing I was looking for was right in front of me the whole time but I couldn't tell because it looked like everything else. That's just bad art design.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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WWW.PCGAMER.COM

Signalis builds a twisted world of nightmares, mystery and space politics, but keeps your focus on the horror of loss.

 

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At first nothing makes sense in Signalis. It's an inscrutable collection of strange places, people and ideas—a puzzle box nested inside a bigger puzzle box, heavily seasoned with robots, space colonisation, skinned nightmare creatures and complex geopolitics. It could so easily be a confusing mess. A dozen big ideas competing for space, enough to fill multiple video games. But it always returns to one simple, existentially worrying thought to tie everything together. Signalis wants you to explore the horror of things found slightly out of place. That tickle at the back of your mind telling you reality is broken, even when everything seems fine.

 

Horror stories frequently play with the feeling that something isn’t quite right about a situation, or that items or characters aren’t where they once were. Films insert a character who tries to tell everyone the terrible truth before it's too late, only to be seen as mad. Signalis takes that one step further, weaving the unreliable nature of reality and memory in as the key narrative theme.

 

You can see shades of it everywhere on the Sierpinski-23 mining facility, seeding the thoughts in our head. The main character, a Replika (essentially a robot) named Elster, searches desperately for her lost human pilot; the administrator of the facility, Adler, battles the feeling that something unnamed is not where it should be, until it drives him completely mad; the remaining Replikas roam the doomed hallways as they would have on any normal day, but now stripped of purpose and their outer shell. Everything is almost as it was, which is somehow unfathomably worse than brand new horrors.

 

 

 

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WWW.TECHRADAR.COM

This space intentionally left blank

 

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Dashing through the blood-drenched corridors of Signalis’ school-like facility, inhabited exclusively by horrifically mutated androids, is a thrilling rush, but one that’s nonetheless left me mentally drained. Elster, our biomechanical protagonist, is one meat cleaver slice away from the scrap heap. Left limping and bleeding heavily from an open wound, her situation’s looking dire.

 

Still several doors away from the safety of a save room – with no shortage of enemies to wade past – I ponder if it’s worth ducking into rooms in the immediate vicinity, on the off-chance I stumble upon even the smallest health item. I can do that, or commit to trekking to the save room where I can pop open the item storage box to heal in safety. Both options present considerable risk. Combat isn’t impossible, but my current state and dwindling ammo count mean it’ll be a strict war of attrition; one that Elster will likely lose.

 

My mind racing, I pause and hang on the inventory screen for a few minutes. Its soft glow and gentle humming nostalgically emulate a CRT display – a cold comfort in Signalis’ dread-soaked halls. It’s then that I realize picking up stray health isn’t an option: my meager inventory space is maxed out at six items, meaning I couldn’t pick up more even if I wanted to. It was go big or go home, then. Elster will make the run to the save room or die trying. And, at that moment, I knew Signalis was turning out to be something very special.

 

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Signalis (space survival horror) - update: mod that expands inventory to 8 slots released (PC version only)
  • 1 month later...

A few more recent essays about this gem of a game!

 

1675267273859-ssa2603694154878b8260c1dd4
WWW.VICE.COM

A conversation with the developers of one of last year's best games about trying to create friction with its players.

 

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Though Konami has done little to nurture the Silent Hill series in the past decade and change, its influence has rarely wavered. You merely needed to know where to look. Nowhere was the power of Silent Hill more pronounced than in 2022’s SIGNALIS from rose-engine, a sprawling and sci-fi intimate story about love and death, a game with the upsetting vibes of Silent Hill and the inventory management of classic Resident Evil.

 

In other words, SIGNALIS was sick as hell. 

 

SIGNALIS struck a chord with a lot of people at Waypoint for many reasons, but one that stands out is how SIGNALIS wears its influences on its sleeve, while forging an identity all its own. It’s a difficult balance to pull off, where you can regularly sit up in your chair, Leonardo DiCaprio-style, and point at an element of SIGNALIS that feels deeply, beautifully in sync with rich veins of gaming history, while recognizing it adds up to much more than references.

 

 

 

signalis-grief.jpg?fit=1024%2C534
WWW.ESCAPISTMAGAZINE.COM

I’ve lost important people to factors that were out of my hands. We all have. These friends helped shape who I am as a person, and I will forever be indebted to them. As I struggle to reconcile the positive aspects of their identities with their actions, survival horror title Signalis asks me why I preserve grief alongside these skewed personas. In Signalis, a fascist regime calls you a “Replika,” a robot replica of a human long forgotten. Each of these Replika robots...

 

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I’ve lost important people to factors that were out of my hands. We all have. These friends helped shape who I am as a person, and I will forever be indebted to them. As I struggle to reconcile the positive aspects of their identities with their actions, survival horror title Signalis asks me why I preserve grief alongside these skewed personas.

 

In Signalis, a fascist regime calls you a “Replika,” a robot replica of a human long forgotten. Each of these Replika robots was fashioned with specific purposes and interests, built to control and be controlled. The Replika model you play as is designated as an “Elster,” based on one particular person. Past and precedence blend as Elster faces a disease that corrupts Replika limbs and reduces robots into mindless zombies. Signalis asks you to uncover the past as you ponder over the decaying cycle of yourself, your missing companion, and those who oppress you. Grief’s long shadow tower over Signalis’ themes of fascism and fractured minds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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