I am very much enjoying brutalist industrial nightmare game Signalis. Partly this is for a very straightforward reason, namely “it is a survival horror game with an easy enough casual mode that even I can play it despite being on an objective level pretty bad at video games, while still managing to get in a good scare from time to time,” but as the game has progressed—I’m about eight hours in—I’ve been finding myself more and more drawn into its distressing little world. The game knows it, too—there are few greater pleasures than realizing how expertly you were maneuvered into engaging with the game in exactly the way it wanted. The aesthetic occasionally feels a bit “late-aughts DeviantArt gallery of my OCs that all look kinda similar,” but there’s an honesty to that, you know? There’s an enthusiasm to the character art, the models, the stylized Japanese and German text glitching into and out of view that connected right to the me from back then, still hungrily scrolling through those galleries.
I will say, though, that I have been reminded once again that if your game has a strict save-point system—no manual saves, no autosaves, it’s “find one of the special red terminals” or nothing—you need to at least have some kind of crash recovery tech in there because I am not exactly looking forward to retracing the last hour’s worth of portaging various keycards up and down the stairs. If I die, shame on me; if the game dies, shame on you.