Signalis is the tried-and-true take on a classic survival horror game with overtones of melancholy.

Survival horror is a genre that has been on its shoulders for many years now, and it goes far beyond Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark. development team rose engine We wanted to try to cover some of the canons of this genre, expressing them in a modern vintage style mixed with anime that interested us a lot. Tried Signalis only to find out what is behind certain magnificent images. More precisely, we’re dedicated to its demo, available for free on Steam.

demo

There demo Too short by Signalis. A Replica technique with a mysterious past, it can be completed in a little over twenty minutes if you immediately guess in what order the protagonist will visit the several rooms that make up the spaceship that Elster wakes up in.

As a result, as it should be, you get more questions than answers so that we can tell you the glaring facts of the world. gameplay without really expecting anything. In fact, there is little to predict. The small portion of the game we tested is divided into a handful of rooms, each located on a single screen. There will also be larger areas for the rest of the game, but not by much. Where are we? Who are we? Why were we sleeping? Why did the spaceship crash on a frozen planet and now it’s filled with creatures that look like they’ve come out of a nightmare and want to get their skin on them?

gameplay

Before answering the existential questions, it is necessary to give some of the strictly practical ones. So we have to find something to defend ourselves and get out of the spaceship. Walking around, we immediately encounter some enemies we can’t fight yet (while unarmed, Elster does simple pushes). We inevitably run away, so we find a weapon with some ammunition and decide to check its effectiveness. Let’s go back to where the apparently mutated hostile creatures are and take aim. The more you aim, the more accurate the shot and the greater its damage-dealing capacity. this battle system It seems very simple and entirely built around the concept of suspense, so the more we panic, the more ammunition we waste in the frenzy of enemy attack. In the demo, the ammo was more than enough to eliminate all available creatures, so we really can’t tell how much weight this will add to the experience. However, we can continue to explore after the enemies are eliminated.

We enter a room with a closed door, which we open by solving a relatively simple puzzle that requires you to align some valves. We made it on our own after a few tries, but as we wandered around the ship we discovered that there was a hidden clue that was practically the solution to the puzzle. Continuing our tour, we came across another puzzle where you had to enter a code on the silent keypad. In this case, we were forced to look for a tip that would really help us, as it is almost impossible to succeed by trial and error (unless you are very lucky). After getting the broken entry card, we fix it with duct tape that we found in another room and head to the exit of the ship since there is nothing useful inside anymore. We were also able to read some documents in all this. Unfortunately they were only photos and technical guides, read the tutorials.

The best part of Signalis, at least its short demo, is the graphic style it definitely mixes with. pixel art In 3D, the details don’t drive you crazy, but it creates a very successful and artistically pleasing mix. Even touches like the old TV effect do it very well. Again, nothing to bend your jaw at, but at least you can see that there is some sensible work behind it. It must be said that the graphic style becomes functional again in first-person framed rooms, which allows us to examine the environment from Elster’s point of view. There are two of these places on the ship, there are two more outside. Unfortunately the demo pretty much ends here. It is difficult to assess what the actual weight of these episodes is compared to the others in the first person. In the part of the game we tried, they were used to enable us to find objects and get from one place to another. It is not yet clear whether they will be used more widely in the final version.