Author's note: while concrete story spoilers are not discussed in this piece, many of its themes and motifs are. I personally recommend playing through Signalis in its entirety before reading, as it is best experienced first-hand.
What is hell? There exist almost as many answers as there are people. Of course, many theologians and philosophers have popularized certain visions or states of hell, though a common one in games (and one that lends itself to the form quite well) is limbo – existing endlessly in a space of not-quite-dead-yet-not-quite-alive, doomed to endlessly wander and repeat the same cycles over and over while slowly growing mad. In Signalis, the new psychological survival horror from two-person team rose-engine, hell may be many things, but it’s almost certainly something of our own design. Signalis is a “classic” survival horror set in a remote mining facility far outside of our own solar system. The game draws on a kaleidoscope of influences both aesthetically and thematically, ranging from surrealist/psychedelic horror of the 60s and 70s, as well as classic cosmic horror (the specter of Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers especially hang over this work), and even soviet-era propaganda and technology. The player takes control of Elster, an LSTER model combat replika (a type of android reminiscent of a replicant from Blade Runner) who wakes up on a crashed scouting ship in the middle of a frozen wasteland. She dons a protective suit and heads out into the frozen wastes, only to soon after descend into a fleshy pit, crawl through a hole, and pick up a copy of The King in Yellow, before suddenly finding herself staring in a mirror of the bathroom of this abandoned facility. She has a photograph of Alina (or was it Ariane?) and knows that she must find this person. The rest of Signalis’ journey is a winding fever dream that requires the player to put together the pieces to solve a mystery both cosmic in scope and deeply personal. I often thought of Kojima Productions’ PT during my time with the game, in that, while the game’s maps are often winding, even nonsensical and impossible spaces, the general thrust of Elster’s direction as she explores is down. Descending both physically and metaphysically into deeper layers of a nightmare of flesh and decay, through further and further circles of Hell. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Agent Philip Jeffries states that they are living inside a dream. In Twin Peaks: The Return, this idea is expanded upon with addition the question: “but who is the dreamer?” Signalis makes the argument that perhaps it’s better off not to know, that perhaps knowing is its own kind of hell. Without getting too deep into spoilers (though, it’s almost impossible to spoil Signalis’ story in the sense we often think about), the logic and feeling of dreams pervades the entirety of Signalis’ run-time. Impossible spaces, characters and relationships that feel like disjunctive cognition, and the inability to make chronological sense of certain events (in some cases, this is a tool leveraged by the storytelling, in others, it’s a classic paradox of an event inciting itself). The most impactful on me, however, was the sense of familiarity. Signalis wears its many influences brazenly on its sleeve, to the point that I initially found some of them a little too on-the-nose (the prevalence of the “Kubrick Carpet” for example, an easter egg that many games are all too eager to shoehorn in). However, as my time with the game continued, they began to have an incredible metanarrative effect – they made Signalis’ world feel familiar while it grew more grotesque, horrifying, and alien by the moment. I could pick out obvious homages to Neon Gensis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, the list goes on, but fascinatingly it began to put me in a headspace that helped me identify with Elster. I haven’t seen these halls before, but they remind me so clearly of spaces I had been. Was it really my first time here? I’m not sure if this is the intended reading for these homages, or if it’s just rose-engine wanting to pay tribute to the works that inspired them, but I can’t deny that it wound up working for me in a stunning, unexpected way. What makes me so certain that these inclusions are more than just references is the intenionality of Signalis’ design. Every HUD element and mechanic have in-universe explanations or representation. For example, a propaganda poster extolling the virtues of keeping only what is needed (no more than 6 items) reinforces the game’s six-item limit. rose-engine has clearly thought a lot about consistency in Signalis, and it is this commitment that gives the entirety of the game, and its narrative, a level of cohesion that is not often seen in the indie games space.
Even without this abstract examination of dreamlike horror and visual metaphor, Signalis has many delicious, blood-soaked layers to entice just about every fan of cosmic and sci-fi horror. Signalis has much to say about the subjugation of bodies under authoritarian regimes and that way that, even under traditionally “noble” story setups (how many stories have been told where the scrappy rebellion flees from the overreaching empire), there are real flesh-and-blood costs to the people whose lives are entangled in the politics of nations that do not care for the individuals that make them up. The many replikas that make up much of Signalis’ cast are revealed, somewhat early in the game, to be copies of an original “gestalt” (implied to be more of a “normal human” than a replika), leading to psychological profiles that can be, disturbingly, accounted for and “optimized” for the best operation of the replika unit. Signalis isn’t interested in “are androids people?” - the text makes it clear that they are deserving of the same respect and personhood that we assign each other – but rather the way that political systems treat humanity as disposable. There’s further layers to this horror: imagine you one day found that you had an operator’s manual – a full print of your likes, your fears, your insecurities, your faults, and how to best account for these in order to have you “operate” at your best? If someone can account for your every move, to “optimize” you, what does that say about free will? Signalis is packed with this subtle, abstract horror. It creeps into the back of your skull and percolates into a rolling boil. Signalis is about so many things, but it remains grounded in core themes about relationships. The bonds we form with one another are stronger than government, than revolution, and with a little eldritch assistance, time and space itself. I am utterly captivated by Signalis – I too, now, feel bonded with this work, this dark narrative that has burrowed into my subconscious. I want to peel back all the layers of this world, to put a microscope to every corner of it. Perhaps that’s rose-engine’s last gift to me: though the game’s four possible endings all bring their own thematic gut punches of closure, the threads of the literal goings-on with Signalis’ world remain tantalizingly incomplete. Whether or not rose-engine decide to revisit this universe or bring us along to a different one, I can count them among the studios I watch with great anticipation.