Waiter!
Waiter!

More doomed yuri please!

Atmospheric, stylish, and old-school hardcore.

I want to love this game.

As other have mentioned, the story music and atmosphere are all great, but unfortunately that's where my praise ends.

The game-play simply isn't satisfying. There's no way for any tension to build when the game forces you into the pause menu every 3 seconds to look at the map, or a clue, change your radio frequency (quickly), equip a replacement auto-injector or cattle prod, or change weapons when you inevitably run out of the 2 shotgun shells you've been able to save up. While there ARE ways to do SOME of these actions without opening the menu, it's simply not efficient to do them outside of the pause menu. Why stay vulnerable while holding down the button for my heal when I can just use it instantly through the pause menu? The same goes for reloading and managing the radio frequencies.

The weapons (with the exception of the cattle prod) in the game are useless to the point where I feel their inclusion is a detriment to the game as a whole. The enemies you "kill" may just decide to get up again unless you torch their bodies with a flare (which are extremely limited). This makes shooting at enemies feel pointless, and encourages you to just ignore anything hostile and run by it, hoping you don't get hit. Once you learn how ineffective the weapons are and that your only real option is to just keep moving it removes the last bits of tension the game had to offer. It's stressful getting backed into a corner firing the last of your bullets to stay alive - it's tedious when you're walking through the same hallway for the 15th time with *another new key* and that baddie that you don't want to waste ammo on slaps your ass. I have yet to encounter the first scenario.

Not sure of the right wording for this but the map design is just not good for this kind of game? This is nit-picky, but in a "survival horror experience" why in the world do you think it's good game design to put a safe room with lots of ammo and meds directly prior to a boss fight in a HORROR game. It makes sense to give players some additional supplies before an encounter in some games, it's a staple of some genres, but when you want the player to have a sense of unease, a sense of tension and stress, don't hold up a sign saying "HEY GAMERS, BOSS FIGHT AHEAD". If you want the player to have access to those supplies, have them be located inside the boss room so that the player doesn't get the massive telegraph that there's about to be a fight, have them located inside the boss room to build tension as the player has to gobble up the supplies in the heat of the moment.

The puzzles are unimaginative and way too easy. I swear half of them are from children's educational games like Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish from the 90's. Most involve grade school level arithmetic and/or critical thinking.

Overall I find that SIGNALIS is less than the sum of its parts, as many (good) mechanics either don't mesh well or directly clash with themselves. It feels like a game with split personality disorder, where it's not sure if it wants to be a visual novel or a survival horror game, and it ends up in a lackluster purgatory somewhere in-between.