Signalis

• Genre: Survival Horror
• Time Played: 13 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's probably a bit short for most peoples tastes, but for me, it felt long.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Undecided. Somewhere in the middle.
• Why I played: I mostly wanted to play because of the visuals in the game. The harsh use red, the awesome character art in the scenes, the red and black robot lesbian. I waited so long to play because I am too scared to play horror games, but a friend implored me to do so.
• Recommend to others: I don't know if I'd really recommend it to most. Maybe if you like to spend time theorizing about things.

I don't usually play survival horror games. I can barely handle horror sequences in non-survival horror games. Metal Gear for instance, usually likes to stick a horror sequence in each game. I tense up at those and really have to push through them.

To be honest, Signalis is probably the lightest Survival Horror game there is. There aren't really jump scares, and while the atmosphere is generally creepy, it doesn't do much dynamically to shift the atmosphere to make the moments more tense. You can clearly see when an enemy is coming up to "surprise" you, and you have plenty of time to react.

You can't go guns-a-blazing mind you. Each area and the game as a whole has finite ammo, and enemies don't have drops, but enemies do respawn at what seems like random intervals. Some seem to respawn multiple times, while others not at all. So this could eventually drain you to the point where you have no weapons at all. In most cases, that could be okay because there are actually a lot of areas where you can just run past enemies, and you can always take a few hits, and there are plenty of restorative times(but also finite).

So while it's pretty low level on the survival horror aspects, it's still just about too much for me. I powered through because I dig other aspects about the game. Gameplay wise, it's damn near almost a puzzle adventure game - but I guess a lot of survival horror games probably have this element, I just don't play them. But you do get a decent amount of puzzles to solve, even if some are just connected the dots on what means what.

The action could be a bit more dynamic, but I'm coming from a place of not usually being into these types of games. For instance on the enemies "respawn" when they are getting themselves back up, or when enemies are crawling out of vents, I feel like you should be able to run over and kick them while their down. "kicking them while they're down" is already a mechanic, so why can't I use it in more situations?

While I understand inventory limitations are a way of making things more tense, I can't help but feel it was too limited, to the point of just making the game more tedious. 6 item slots the whole game, and yet sometimes you have a door that specifically has 6 keys. So you either only carry the keys or make multiple trips. There are just a lot situations where I found myself unnecessarily running back and forth - and nothing really happened in those instances where having smaller inventory enhanced the moment, even in a way I wouldn't like. There should have been 8 slots.