Is it worth buying?

[Fabmaster2000]

I enjoy survival horror a lot! Over the past 2 years I’ve been going through the classic survival horror titles, RE, Silent Hill, etc. I played RE0 recently, while not a bad game, it had some frustrating mechanics and enemies that have left a sour taste behind. I guess I don’t really care about the story for Signalis, but I’m more concerned if the gameplay, puzzles, difficulty, and replay value is good enough?

[Coldflame]

the classic RE gameplay is here pretty much to the tee, inventory/resource management, exploration, key hunting and reasonably tricky puzzles (a bit harder than old RE games on average). if you crank the difficulty up to survival mode then it's probably a little harder than REmake on hard mode is, can't comment on normal mode since i haven't played that

explicit replay value isn't really there, there's a few alternate endings based on the game's assessment of your playstyle plus a secret ending that you won't realistically be able to find without a guide. i can see myself booting this up every couple of years for a replay but there isn't much in the way of content to bring you in a second time aside from maybe the difficulty selection

the story's pretty interesting and has some thematic meat to it, but if you don't care for it there's still about as much game as an old school RE title (4-5 areas depending on how you count them)

can't really comment on 'frustrating mechanics' without hearing a little more about what you considered frustrating

[goka9696]

Replay value comes primarily from trying to understand the story and notice things that you've missed on the first playthrough. If you don't care about that there isn't much replay value in Signalis since sadly there's no additional gameplay modes or unlocks. Getting different endings can also be pretty difficult due to the way the game calculates them, to the point that trying to get a specific ending can be borderline immersion breaking.

Puzzles are pretty good. They aren't nonsensical but they also aren't pushovers either for the most part, and overall gameplay is enjoyable and can be reminiscent of the first Resident Evil. There's a lot of inventory management, and enemies require a special item to kill permanently, so you're never 100% safe, though overall the game is actually on the easier side as far as Survival Horror titles are concerned.

I can understand disliking RE0 since that's a pretty polarizing game, but if you enjoyed Silent Hill and the first Resident Evil I think you're pretty much guaranteed to enjoy Signalis.

If you enjoy classic survival horror you might also want to check out Tormented Souls, though I personally found that game to be a pretty disappointing experience and Signalis imo blows it out of the water completely.