Signalis, the tried-and-true classic survival horror with sad ringtones

Survival horror is kind of many years on his shoulders now and goes well beyond Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark itself. development team Rose engine She wanted to try to take some canons of this kind, and express them in a modern antique style mixed with anime, which piqued our curiosity so much, that we Try Signalis Just to find out what lies behind some great photos. More precisely, we have devoted ourselves to its demo, which is freely available at steam.

experimental

there experimental By Signalis is very short. It can be completed in just over twenty minutes, even less if you immediately guess the order in which you must visit the few rooms that make up the spaceship in which the protagonist, Elster, awakens, a Replica tech with a mysterious past.

In conclusion, you’ll get more questions than answers, as you should, so much so that we can tell you the salient facts about Play Without really expecting anything. In fact, there is not much to expect. The small part of the game that we tested is divided into a few rooms, each of which is on a single screen. There will also be some larger areas in the rest of the game, but not too many. Where are we? who are we? Why were we sleeping? Why did the spaceship fall on a frozen planet and is now full of creatures that seem to have come out of a nightmare and want to get their skin?

Play

Before giving answers to existential questions, it is necessary to give some strictly practical questions. This means that we have to find something to defend ourselves and be able to get out of the spaceship. We walk around and immediately encounter some enemies, which we cannot fight against (when they are unarmed, Elster gives simple pushes). We inevitably run away, so we find a rifle with some ammo and decide to check it out. Let’s go back to where the hostile beings, apparently mutated humans, are, and target. The more time you shoot, the more accurate the shot will be and the more damage it can do. The combat system It seems very simple and built entirely around the concept of tension, that is, the more we panic, the more ammo we waste in the frenzy of enemy attack. In the demo, the ammo was more than enough to take out all the creatures present, so we can’t say how much this affected the experience. However, once the enemies are eliminated, we can continue to explore.

We enter a room with a closed door, we open it with a relatively simple puzzle solution, which requires you to arrange some valves. We made it ourselves, after several attempts, but as we were wandering around the ship we discovered that there was a hidden hint that was practically solving the mystery. Continuing our tour, we came across another puzzle where you have to enter a code on the mute keyboard. In this case, we had to look for a guide that would really help us, because success by trial and error is almost impossible (unless you are very lucky). Having a broken access card, we fix it with masking tape, which is in another room, and head towards the exit of the ship, since there is nothing inside that can be useful anymore. In all this we were also able to read some documents. Too bad it was just pictures and technical guides, read the tutorials.

The best part of Signalis, at least in the short demo, is definitely his graphic style which he blends in with pixel art 3D, creating a very successful and technically interesting combination, although the details don’t drive you crazy. Even touches like the old TV effect make it very good. Again, nothing takes off your jaw, but at least you can see that there is a reasonable function behind it. It must be said that the graphic style becomes practical again in the first-person framed rooms, allowing us to examine the environment through Elster’s point of view. On the ship there are two of these places, while there are two others outside. Too bad, the demo pretty much ends here. It is difficult to assess the actual weight of these sections in a first person perspective compared to other sections. In the part of the game that we tried, they were used to make us find objects and make us move from one place to another. It remains to be seen whether or not it will be exploited in the final version on a larger scale.