Signalis - a Sci-fi Survival Horror with Resi 2 vibes

[bradigor]

Just now, Popo said:

Confusingly, the game wants you to press A to move into the screen, the progress of which is initially obscured completely as there’s no visible landmarks in the distance - they only become visible (and barely at that) after you’ve done this. I think the developers assume you know how to move in the first person mode because they tutorialised it in the opening section, but I’m not entirely convinced - and definitely not a good introduction for visually impaired players. 

 

Yea, this is really not a good design choice I have to say. Silent Hill did it, and it wasn’t good then either. 

 

Thanks. It is not at all. Will try again later.

[Hitcher]

Not played much but was disappointed with the controls -

 

• No invert Y camera axis
• Changing the button layout also changes the button layout for the menus

 

Needs a bit of polish IMO.

[K]

I thought this looked really interesting, but I didn't realise quite how Resident Evil it was going to be - it's pretty much a direct copy, with different set dressing and an indie game fractured narrative. I'm not a huge fan of Resident Evil unfortunately, particularly the old school games; I'll have to see if the narrative and atmosphere is enough to carry me through it.

 

Still, I like the moody, oppressive feel of the game. I'm less keen on the faux-Japanese style, but the CRT filter is one of the best I've seen.

[Alan Stock]

5 hours ago, BadgerFarmer said:

The first boss, as I remember it:

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The big guy with the gun? You can damage it when it collapses to the ground and blood pours out of its mask. The rest of the time, just stay out of the way and take out the minor enemies.

 

 Thanks, yeah I returned to it just after my last post out of stubbornness. It still took me multiple attempts to figure that out, the signposting is pretty bad. Boss spoilers:

Spoiler

She's obviously bulletproof and if you aren't at the right angle during the vulnerable phase the bullets ping off, which meant i didnt realise until it twigged that was the weak phase  I needed to get up in her grill. Even then the feedback that you are doing damage isn't great, she recoils a bit but every second or third shot looks like its having no effect. Additionally the animation for her spewing up is like the one where she puts out tendrils so I wasn't keen to get close and you take damage if you do. On top of that there's things like gas tanks in the room that look like they explode. The player communication is just a bit ropey and not helped by the randomness of the phases, the shortness of the vulnerabilty window or that you may be preoccupied with trash mobs or swiping items. Once I figured it out it I got it second try. Reminded me a lot of the snake boss in Resi 1 where youre never sure whether you are doing the right thing. 

 

[Eighthours]

3 hours ago, Hitcher said:

No invert Y camera axis

 

How can this EVER still be a thing in the year of our Lord 2022?!

[Nosejam]

Not sure if I love this or hate it, but I’ve played 4 hours and got to the mines, it’s certainly compulsive. 

[K]

Do you ever really need to invert the Y-axis? There are first-person bits, but it's just moving a cursor round on a screen. There aren't any bits (so far, anyway) with 3D camera movement.

[Popo]

3 hours ago, K said:

Do you ever really need to invert the Y-axis? There are first-person bits, but it's just moving a cursor round on a screen. There aren't any bits (so far, anyway) with 3D camera movement.

There’s at least one bit about an hour in that’s a more fully former first person experience. Quite disorienting. 
 

I will say that I’m enjoying it a good deal though. Haven’t yet figured out what’s going on with the radio frequencies but…

 

Spoiler

I imagine it’s got something to do with the locked safe I found. One of the frequencies mentions a sword, and in the room with the safe is a poster of a character holding a sword, although the safe code didn’t work when I tried it. 

 

[Yiggy]

15 minutes ago, Popo said:

There’s at least one bit about an hour in that’s a more fully former first person experience. Quite disorienting. 
 

I will say that I’m enjoying it a good deal though. Haven’t yet figured out what’s going on with the radio frequencies but…

 

  Hide contents

I imagine it’s got something to do with the locked safe I found. One of the frequencies mentions a sword, and in the room with the safe is a poster of a character holding a sword, although the safe code didn’t work when I tried it. 

 

You’re along the right lines. 

Spoiler

Look at the wall safes closely. 

I’ve enjoyed the first couple of hours. With headphones on it’s very atmospheric and is channeling some great source material at times. Alien, The Thing, MGS etc. 

 

Only thing I got really annoyed at is that enemies seem to come back to life after a bit? Despite shooting, zapping and stomping? Or am I being thick?

[BadgerFarmer]

53 minutes ago, Yiggy said:

You’re along the right lines. 

  Hide contents

Look at the wall safes closely. 

I’ve enjoyed the first couple of hours. With headphones on it’s very atmospheric and is channeling some great source material at times. Alien, The Thing, MGS etc. 

 

Only thing I got really annoyed at is that enemies seem to come back to life after a bit? Despite shooting, zapping and stomping? Or am I being thick?

Yeah, that happens. A bit later on

Spoiler

you'll find ways of stopping it - like in Resi 1 Remake.

 

[Yiggy]

I think I might stop playing. 
 

About 3 hours in. I’m finding it very tough and a lot of memory is needed to recall where you’ve been and where you’re going next. Especially when you die. Ammo is fairly scarce and aiming and targeting seems a bit sketchy. It’s gotten me quite frustrated at times. Also seems like it’s a fairly sizeable game and I’m not sure I can do this for more than 4-5 hours. 
 

Will sleep on it and see if I feel like a bit more pain tomorrow. 
 

I think they’ve done a cracking job with the design overall though. For someone with patience I bet it’s cracking. 

[Alan Stock]

So I'm quite far into this now, I feel like I'm near the end. The level design has gotten a little bit more interesting (though not much), along with the story and general weirdness. And the gameplay although familiar became a bit more entertaining in having access to more weapons, planning out routes and deciding what enemies need to be dealt with. Unfortunately its still very by the numbers in large parts and the homages feel like straight off rip-offs at times, even if they did have good intentions. Your eyes will definitely roll on some occasions if you've played some of the genre classics.

 

As the game goes on the inventory juggling gets worse and worse, as you have more weapons, ammo, and key items to take care of. Usually you aren't far from a storage box, and the inventory forces you to curtail your strength, but this is far outweighed by annoyance. Want to use a tool like the flashlight - it uses an inventory slot. Want health? An inventory slot. But there's four types of health pickups, so that sucks up space if you happen upon more than one type. One of the weapons only holds 1 bullet inside so that's 2 slots guaranteed if you want any ammo for it. You'll mostly want to collect items when you find them to avoid backtracking, but you'll find the inventory fills up so fast its impossible. Go to a new area toting a gun, tool and health item, and you'll only have a few slots left for the numerous items you find in each room. Its also clunky to manage. You spend so much time fiddling with and worrying about inventory management it gets in the way of the game. Even though this was a critical part of Resi 1 etc, it was never this much of a pain. It creates so much unnecessary busywork when you just want to be getting on with progression.

 

Combat gets much more prevelant as the game goes on, encouraging you to only take fights you need in order to conserve ammo. Targetting gets increasingly finnicky as more enemies are introduced, some of which close on you very fast, leading to some frustrating scenarios. Navigating the environment also becomes increasingly irritating, due to the lack of locked door and item information on the map. For example, when you find a locked door that needs a key on the map, it will appear as locked - but not show what the door name or key required is. Which is a bit annoying when you have a bunch of locked doors spread over multiple floors to remember. And there's no Resident Evil 2 style indicator on the map to show if you've cleared a room of items, meaning you run around clicking on everything just in case you missed something, and items can blend into the detailed backgrounds quite easily.

 

So it continues to be decent but a bit of a slog to be honest. It is quite satisfying at times but uninspiring. It's the cool premise, lore and weirdness that keep you going. I would say if its not doing it for you in the first main area, don't expect much evolution from the formula. A bit dissapointing overall to be honest, but I will plug on to the end. It often feels like its leaned into some of the more chorelike and annoying elements of those oldies, like running from place to place with 6 key items without the level design to back it up, or variety to add spice. Signalis is a hard game to rate because at times it does slip into a nice survival horror groove and has its own narrative and artistic spin. Competant overall, but doesn't have the magic spark of the best Resi's, and certainly no 9/10 for me.

 

But maybe I'm just not as willing to forgive its shortcomings as other people. For example even though Silent Hill 2 has some excellent elements and story, I still think it has horrible gameplay and loads of annoyances and should be judged as such, but many people rate it as one of the best games of all time. Maybe the difference is that Silent Hill 2 had some amazing moments and a strong story and atmosphere to prop it up, whereas Signalis never quite reaches those heights.

[Benny]

I'm near the start of the game and honestly I think the item restriction bollocks is already a hard nope from me.

 

I realise it's a staple of the genre classics, but there's a reason that particular form of survival horror design has moved on. Back in the day, I think a large part of it was just designed to artificially pad out game length. Restrictive amounts of ammo was what added tension, but having to hoof it past a load of enemies specifically to save ammo just because you didn't offload enough items in a chest five minutes ago really grates nowadays. I'm a lot less forgiving now of games that don't respect your free time with circuitous design.

 

In this game in particular, it was a small thing, but I was just starting to get into it when I first encountered having too many items: I couldn't pick up a "Mensa" room key, which it turned out was needed for the room I'd just left, but now I had to go all the way back to the chest just to then get back to the room I've been in, to get a key, for a room that I've now been past twice. For no good reason. It sucks out the tension and the sense of progression, and to be honest if it's a sign of things to come but worse, I'm definitely dropping this one.

 

I mean, six items including weapons and health? Six?!

[Alan Stock]

Yeah, it gets a lot worse in that regard, if its already bothering you then you will go insane later!

 

I was right, turns out I was very close to the end and just finished it. The last boss was annoying because it used a silly bit of game design. Also, because I was on critical health with no health pickups left at the end of the fight, the following sequences forced me to experience the low health heartbeat controller rumble throughout, which was silly. The story though is pretty intriguing and open to interpretation and deep dives, there's already a ton of discussion about it on Reddit/Steam and what it all means, which is my kind of jam.

 

Unfortunately there seem to be 4 endings and only the fourth 'secret' one has been figured out how to reliably trigger by the community (its complicated to do and I think it requires starting from earlyish in the game). The first ending is a 'bad' ending that is probably based on you doing poorly, second is the ending I got which is the most common, and there's a third ending that some people get but noone really knows why - it may be based on getting lots of kills. One player even got two different endings from using the same lategame save file! They were definitely emulating Silent Hills obsure to get endings and those add some new plot details to mull over. Thankfully Youtube has us covered for watching the endings without slogging through the game again, video in the spoiler below;

Spoiler

 

 

I'll spend the next few days dipping into the giant Steam thread and reading up on theories. Like Silent Hill, there's plenty to like here but I just wish there was a better core game wrapped around this mystery.

 

PS 'Active' playtime at the end was about 12 hours (standard difficulty), and Active+Inactive playtime was about 13 hours. I presume Inactive means when I went AFK. 6 Deaths. Don't know if the Active time includes all the time in menus doing inventory stuff or reading files. 

[Benny]

Enemies that don't stay dead is also a pet hate of mine. The zombies in Resi 1 remake tested my patience in that regard, but at least that was a little metagame in itself that required you to decide which were worth burning. Limited ammo and enemies that also come back, added to repeated backtracking and inability to wander a bit if you get stuck because it's too resource risky? Yeah I'm out. Nice atmosphere and all that, but it's likely to frustrate me too much these days.

[Benny]

Those review quotes in the OP are really baffling as well. "Fresh and reinvigorating". I mean it's about as traditional to old school survival horror games as it gets, short of having shit controls. The overriding feeling I was having was... Boredom. Which isn't an especially good sign for a horror game.

 

Worth the punt being on Game Pass though.

[BadgerFarmer]

7 hours ago, Benny said:

Enemies that don't stay dead is also a pet hate of mine. The zombies in Resi 1 remake tested my patience in that regard, but at least that was a little metagame in itself that required you to decide which were worth burning.

This does have that same mechanic. It just doesn't get introduced till a little further in.

 

Although with all the item chest backtracking, I always just chose to burn the enemies near save rooms.

[Jamie John]

Well, this has been a rollercoaster. I was so up for dipping into this after the EG review, but having read the thread and people's thoughts on the later parts of the game, I don't think I'll bother. 

 

What are the chances of this getting updated to make the inventory more generous, do we reckon? Maybe the Steam release will be modded.

[Alan Stock]

It's a tricky one, on Steam I've seen plenty of people saying they love this game. Interestingly part of the audience there is possibly a bit younger and seems to have not played stuff like Silent Hill. I see quite a few questions asking where they can find other sci-fi games or media like it, when its already a well trodden subgenre. The atmosphere is certainly great, the art style cool and the story is fun to unpiece. I spent an hour last night reading up on theories, the Steam forum Endings thread has 60 pages of discussion where people have been re-examining the documents in the game and uncovering little details. Its very Silent Hill in this regard in that the story is much more interesting and creepier than the gameplay. I'll definitely be going down the rabbit hole on this one, its got your classic cosmic horror 2001 Space Oddysey and Silent Hill dreams vs reality vibes to it. For me it's a 7/10 overall, an 8/10 if you're generous, but the story definitely elevates it.

 

I can see why some people gave it 8/10 or 9/10 but if the issues I've listed sound like too much of a barrier then it's probably not worth it. However the game is really cheap and free on Gamepass so its worth giving a shot if you have that, or a bit of money to burn.

 

It's worth pointing out on Steam that there are also a large amount of posts complaining about the inventory restrictions (including Resi veterans) with most people echoing the thoughts on here. If the devs respond to feedback, which they might, I imagine they'd need to rebalance the difficulty a bit, but it would be worth it in my opinion.

[Alan Stock]

So they are listening:

 

[AI]

Strange why they didn't copy the original Resident Evil's character select where Jill would get 8 inventory slots and Chris would only have 6.

[Benny]

37 minutes ago, Alan Stock said:

So they are listening:

 

 

I think the interesting thing about this is that it's associating the slot restriction with challenge. I don't think it makes the actual gameplay more challenging especially, it just enforces more backtracking, so in that way just increases the chance you might encounter enemies more times.

 

It could do with just easy/normal/hard mode with 12/9/6 inventory slots or something. Then it just gives the players the choice, without taking anything away from the players who want the restriction left in.

[earlymodernsteve]

Echo most of the points above. The 6 item limit is just annoying - especially as a key card is the same size as a shotgun on this basis. Just moving key cards out of the main inventory would make a massive difference.

[Kayin Amoh]

I'm kinda bored before it even gets really going. I crawled into a hole and now I'm wobbling about rattling the doorknobs of a million broken doors.

[BadgerFarmer]

Even increasing the slots to 8 would make a big difference, I think. As Benny says, it's not really even about challenge - it's not a difficult game - just about cutting back on pointless trips across areas.

[earlymodernsteve]

4 minutes ago, BadgerFarmer said:

Even increasing the slots to 8 would make a big difference, I think. As Benny says, it's not really even about challenge - it's not a difficult game - just about cutting back on pointless trips across areas.

Yep. It's like they loved the idea of one of the challenge modes for a Resi game and made that the default experience. I went in expecting to love this but between the backtracking and the weird German anime weeb cutscenes it just isn't landing for me. 

[Alan Stock]

53 minutes ago, Benny said:

 

I think the interesting thing about this is that it's associating the slot restriction with challenge. I don't think it makes the actual gameplay more challenging especially, it just enforces more backtracking, so in that way just increases the chance you might encounter enemies more times.

 

I agree, and people on Steam are responding similarily to how they phrased it. 90% of the time its just timewasting.

 

I was just reading a post where someone broke down all the items. There are 13 item types just of ammo and health. Add to that 6 weapons and a number of equippable tools, plus non-stackable key items. The player will usually only have 2 or 3 free slots. Now take your 13 ammo/health types plus a bunch of key items and spread them around. Go to a new room, find 3 item types, now your inventory is full and you need to go back to the box, or push on and hope you get more of the same item so it stacks.

 

Talking of stacking, ammo and health have max stack sizes, which are generous but still aggravate the problem. You also can't drop items on the ground or swap them, so if you accidentally get items which you can't use you are trapped with a full inventory. This even happens for one fight where you seemingly can't progress if you have a full inventory, because you can't pick up the item you need. So you just have to let yourself die. Nice. The only good inventory feature is that if your gun is empty and you come across ammo you don't have space for, she'll take a few bullets from the stack on the ground and put them in the gun.

[K]

I'm not a fan of that kind of primitive inventory where you have a set number of slots and each item takes up one slot, regardless of how big or heavy it is. There was an Amiga game, Dreamweb, where a pair of sunglasses took up one slot of your limited inventory, even if you were wearing them, which always struck me as absolutely ridiculous.

[Alan Stock]

Yeah, even Resi 1 had the concept of items taking up multiple slots. So to me perhaps the easiest quick fix whilst keeping the design principles would be to increase inventory slots overall, but raise how many slots certain items/weapons take up. Unfortunately the game doesn't have a gridlike inventory though, so in practice they can't do this without overhauling the code/graphics. So they'll probably just have to give you extra slots.

 

Its an interesting design challenge because there are slight differences to Resi in that there are more enemies, more item types and more key items to worry about. But give players too many slots and they can carry too many useful items and remove the challenge. I think this is why grid inventories work quite well for this kind of game because you can easily scale up the size of powerful items and make key items really small. You can still use stack limits to prevent people having too much ammo/health on them.

 

[Benny]

Honestly I think if they just doubled the item limit or something I would probably go back to it as I liked the atmosphere a lot.

 

As has been mentioned: the problem is compounded by fact there are not only lots of things that you need to pick up, but also that the health items have several distinct un-stackable types that all do the same thing to various degrees. And they're not able to be combined like green herbs in Resident Evil to improve their restorative effect as well as free an inventory slot. Capcom were wise about allowing them to be combined like this as it put the restrictive nature of carrying them more into the player's hands.

 

In Signalis it has the ability to Combine items just like Resident Evil, but doesn't seem to understand why this was allowed for health items specifically in that game. It's for this reason that it feels very much like a game that is trying hard to slavishly copy those design elements that have been seen in other games without really understanding the reason they worked the way they did at that time.

 

It feels a bit like the "Boomer Shooter" revival that is happening recently: some of those new games really understand the parts that made those old games great, whilst iterating on the best parts of the design of some of them. But to do that requires an innate understanding of why they were designed the way they were, and not being afraid to change the formula is what has made games like Ultrakill so actually fresh and compelling. But there are just as many that don't really know what they're doing beyond fast movement and low-res software rendered graphics.