A few months ago, a friend and fellow trophy hunter, revisited a survival horror game, that we had both been interested in since its release in 2022, called Signalis. We had both been intrigued by its PlayStation 1-style graphics and survival horror gameplay but as often happens with smaller titles it got swept aside by bigger games that were released and Signalis was pushed down the list of things to play. When my friend went to get the Platinum trophy in it, he fell in love with it and recommended it to me with the promise that the game was so good, that he watched a 2-hour video essay going through all of its narrative influences and references.
I am a sucker for games with capital L “Lore” in them and I decided to follow his recommendation, so the next time the game went on sale I picked it up. Needing a palette cleanser from the epic that was Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, I loaded up Signalis, and it didn’t take long before I was sure this would be my 247th Platinum Trophy. So clear out your inventory pouch, grab your pistol and let’s solve the puzzle of what it’s like to earn the Platinum Trophy, for Signalis.
In Signalis, you play as Elster, a Replika unit that wakes up on a ship that appears to have crashed on a remote planet. There is no sign of her commanding officer so you leave the ship, eventually finding a strange deep hole in the ground, against all common sense Elster enters the hole, and finds herself in a small radio station, with a copy of Robert Chambers famous novel, the King in Yellow sitting on a desk in front of her. Picking it up, things get weird momentarily, before Elster wakes up standing in front of a mirror in a bathroom. From here Elster finds herself searching a mining facility on the Planet Leng for a woman she has a photograph of, but standing between Elster and her goal, are a horde of corrupted Replikas, driven insane by a strange virus.
The narrative of Signalis is beautiful and tragic, and I won’t say anything more specific than that because I feel like the twists are too important to spoil, and the story, at least for me, was the best part of the game. What I can say is this though, the story is intricately woven but it is told in a quite roundabout fashion. The narrative is experienced in the same way you talk about a dream you had but you can’t quite remember it all, half concrete memory, half vague recollection, but all covered by a haze and it leaves you wondering, what it all means at the end. For some people, I think this could be an issue, some people like more straightforward stories with digestible plots but if you like the idea of a story that leaves some of its interpretations up to you, then I would definitely recommend it.
Much like the friend who recommended it to me, I spent the next hour after I finished Signalis for the first time, looking up discussions and theories online and watching his recommended 2 hour video essay, and there are still parts of the story I am still wrapping my head around.
Signalis has multiple endings too, and it’s well worth seeing them all, as they have a great impact on how you interpret the journey you have been through.
While the actual plot that the game follows can be vague and interpretable, the way Signalis builds its world is much clearer.
Like any good survival horror you pick up hundreds of little notes, some are tutorials on new weapons or how to heal amongst other things, but for the most part, the notes are world-building and story-related. Each of them does an incredible job of building up the world and setting of the game piece by piece, which in turn provides little hints and nudges for both the mysteries of the narrative and the puzzles the game asks you to complete.
The aesthetic of the game builds on top of this too, its retro-futuristic setting evoking imagery from Soviet Russia or Germany to really highlight the nature of the repressive totalitarian regime the characters are living in.
The abandoned mining facility, with its dark oppressive hallways, full of cramped and winding spaces, mirrors the narrative and creates an unnerving and tense atmosphere. The stellar soundtrack completes this, filling the space with dark and intense music as you explore, hell even the sound effect that plays when you try to save the game is anxiety-inducing. This feeling never lets up, as you push deeper and deeper into the nightmarish facility you begin to encounter the terrifying mutations of other Replika’s, driven mad by the virus. Some are passive, standing in dark corners, gently shaking to themselves but easily avoided. Others are more aggressive, patrolling rooms and searching for a poor Replika to attack.
They all share one thing in common though, all of them are waiting to unleash their blood-curdling scream when they spot you, before bull-rushing towards you in an attempt to maul you to death. These enemies are great, especially the bosses, having varied yet horrific designs, and requiring different tactics to deal with. The simple EULEs are easy to avoid and easy to shoot, but the more aggressive STAR units with their shields, or the incredibly cool Kolibri enemies require more thought.
Signalis also has a system similar to Resident Evil Remakes Crimson Heads, where enemies you have defeated will come back to life randomly later on unless you burn them with thermite or a flare gun. These are, obviously, limited, so you are constantly wondering if it’s worth burning these enemies to safeguard your route if you need to come back here, or leave them and hope you don’t have to come through too often. When the enemies are dead and unburned, their corpses seem to vibrate softly on the ground, and it’s incredibly creepy, but also means you never know if the movement is them getting up, or just twitching.
I do wish there were more bosses in the game, as there were only 3, although considering my first playthrough of Signalis took around 6 and a half hours, maybe any more bosses would have felt too much, especially on a harder difficulty with fewer resources available, although this does lead me to what is my only issue with Signalis. It’s combat, which isn’t awful, but it could be much better. I found it to be a little janky, especially with the aiming. You press the left trigger to enter an aiming stance, then use the right stick to aim. When you a target a small square will appear, and if you hold the aim for a few seconds the square will get smaller, and the shot will be a precision shot and do some extra damage. This is a similar mechanic to the Resident Evil remakes, and I think it’s a great idea. What I struggled with though was that sometimes the reticule would just, disappear, even if I wasn’t moving or the enemy wasn’t obstructed, so I would have to reset my aim and try again. It wasn’t game-breaking and it only happened enough times to be a small annoyance for me, but it did lead to me trying to avoid combat wherever possible, for fear of losing my aim at a critical moment and taking a hit.
Thankfully combat can be avoided fairly often, with there often being enough space to kite enemies or sneak past them to get to your goals, and this helps save resources for the fights you do need to do which is something the game has learned from one of its major inspirations, Resident Evil. You have a very limited inventory of only 6 spaces, but there are safe rooms with storage boxes you can use to mitigate this, but it does encourage backtracking, or some difficult decisions if you are far from a safe room. If you don’t have room for the key puzzle item, do you leave it here and come back later when you have more space, but potentially have to deal with resurrected enemies, or do you throw away the healing items or ammo that you don’t need right at this moment, but who knows when how many enemies will be between here and the next safe room. This choice is something that you will be faced with often, as the game loves to always have just a few more things than you can carry in between safe rooms.
Knowing what items to carry and when is also important as Signalis is filled with puzzles that need specific items on. As someone who loves Puzzles, I was never disappointed in the game’s variety of brain teasers. The puzzles here range from really simple ones like opening a safe by reading a document that is in a different room that has the code helpfully written down on it, to much more complex ones like riddle solving, or using radio signals to reveal keypad codes for locked rooms around the map. I found them all to be incredibly enjoyable to work out, and none of them were frustrating or so difficult it took me out of the game. One thing that I thought was a really cool tool was the Eidetic Eye item. This is an equipable item that lets you take a photo of something in the game, which can be incredibly helpful for remembering puzzle hints or answers when the actual puzzle is far away. However as I was playing on PlayStation, it was far easier to just use the screenshot function, or take a note on my phone, so I didn’t really use it. However, the fact that the puzzles needed me to take notes or screenshots at all, is a positive in my book, as it meant they weren’t too simple to solve.
In contrast to some of the puzzles though, earning the Platinum Trophy, “Achtung” is a simple affair. There are only two missable trophies, and these are for getting two additional, but powerful weapons. One is in the first area, and requires finding the Revolver for “Einhorn”. This is pretty simple, you just need to explore the area after the First Boss thoroughly, to find the hunter’s key and use it on the Gun Case in the shooting range. The second weapon is the rifle, which gives you the trophy “Nitro”. For this, you will need to beat the second boss and find a small bottle that you can use to wake up an unconscious person in one of the safe rooms. This bottle requires a little bit of backtracking in the area, as a door will appear in one of the rooms that wasn’t there before, in a room where you can find a large wooden doll. Once you use the bottle on the person, they will give you the rifle.
There is also a trophy for dying once called “Schwerer Ausnahmfehler” and for dying 16 times which is called “Locher”.
Lastly, there is “Uberleben” which is for beating the game on survival difficulty with classic inventory rules, this run took me about 4 hours in total. You can attempt this from the start if you want to, but as with most games, I feel it’s better to do a normal run first, before throwing yourself into a difficult challenge.
The remaining 7 trophies are all story-related and unmissable, despite the game having multiple endings, it doesn’t matter which one you get.
Signalis does a lot of things incredibly well, its Silent Hill-inspired story, combined with Resident Evil-inspired gameplay made for a brilliant, if melancholy and scary experience, that I would highly recommend to anyone who has even a passing interest in these types of games. It’s a beautiful game both in its message and its retro-style graphics, and I love the way it tells its story, peeling back layers of meaning as you complete it, leaving you with so much to think about after you have finished.
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