3.5/5 ★ – Fernofai's review of Signalis.

Signalis is a very interesting take on the survival horror genre, setting it in a futuristic world and mixing German, Russian, and Japanese culture into it. The storyline seems pretty basic at first, where a mysterious entity found beneath a mining facility on an industrialized moon starts to corrupt the so-called "Replikas", which are androids working for the humans referred to as "Gestalts". As one of these, you have to manage and fight your way through the mostly abandoned station and uncover what causes the corruption. However, things soon start to become very strange and surreal, and it becomes apparent that your own backstory as an android living with a human who slowly succumbs to a cancerous illness somehow plays into all of it. For me, it was too difficult to grasp the actual story and deeper meaning from the storytelling, because there are so many subtle hints that only a very small percentage of players will understand, and even fewer will piece together. Even after watching a few explanation videos afterward, I couldn’t get that retrospective excitement about how smart the game actually is - the way I did with movies like The Lighthouse, which share a similar aesthetic. Apart from that, Signalis is still fully enjoyable as a top-down / pixel-art / anime-style version of the early Resident Evil formula, which is one of my favorite kinds of games. It has a bunch of creative puzzles, the typical backtracking gameplay of running through corridors to find keys or items and unlock new rooms, cool boss fights, and combat in general—though sadly only a few different types of standard enemies. The difficulty, for me, was well balanced. I had the (intended) struggle with ammunition and items, had to think ahead when managing my limited inventory in one of the few save areas and needed to be very careful about when to fight or avoid an enemy-packed room. In the end, I had a good time playing Signalis, but also a rather confusing one. Looking into the story again afterward helped me appreciate the whole thing as a very personal work, but I wish it had brought that impact while playing, rather than only afterward while studying it.