Recent reviews by VasteV

Not bad.

I stopped playing over a year ago and only came back briefly at the start of 2023.
The economy was the straw that finally broke the camel's back and I'm sad to report it's still buggered. Paying for premium account used to be a shortcut to acquiring new vehicles faster, now it's a necessity. Gaijin Entertainment has been chipping away at player progression, making it worse and worse with each passing year. It got to the point where Gaijin openly stated F2P players are a burden, so make of that what you will.

Greed's the name of the game and the only way to win is not participate in this bull.

Originally posted by VasteV:

At the time of writing, I have less than half an hour on record. That is because I originally played SIGNALIS on PS4, but right after finishing it I jumped on Steam to buy it just so I can support the devs in any way I can and play through it again. Only very few games in my life were as appealing to me that I was not only willing to shell out for a physical copy with extra goodies imported from Japan (absolutely worth it btw), but also buy it again on different platform right after. It's a phenomenal experience.

SIGNALIS is a wonderful smörgåsbord of a survival horror drawing inspiration from vast library of sources, created by studio rose-engine consisting of two members (German duo Yuri Stern & Barbara Wittmann) over the course of eight years with help of couple of composers and QA testers. It's a passion project through and through and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is it worth every penny. It definitely wins 2022 game awards for "less you know, the better it gets" and "go in blind".

Gameplay and narrative wise, it's a standard survival horror affair. You play as Elster, a Replika(Android with bio components) unit in service of Great Nation in search for her missing Gestalt (human) officer who went missing after your exploration and survey ship crash lands on a hostile, blizzard covered world. Your sole motivation going forward being a vague promise made to her partner that is brought up every now and then. Top down view and slow, deliberate movement typical of the genre, tight inventory management, scarce resources (that can be made even scarcer thanks to optional Survival mode), somewhat basic but efficient combat along with numerous challenging puzzles that tread the line in being difficult enough to rack your brain over but never frustrate the player, is the bread and butter of SIGNALIS.

Aesthetically, the game combines character designs Peter Chung's tall and lean builds, facial features reminiscent of Ergo Proxy with a pinch Tsutomu Nihei's bio-mechanical components. Environments will feel familiar to fans of Alien's retro futuristic space stations on far fringe's of inhabited space with 80's computers and CRT monitors everywhere (with nods to Stanley Kubrick's work here and there), Dead Space and its lived-in industrial corridors, Silent Hill's ramshackle rusted interiors and occasional descent into otherworldly and eerie locations taken straight from traditional artwork or nigh endless, stark expanses of near uniform colour scheme which will ring a bell or two for fans of Evangelion or Devilman.
OST is mostly comprised of ambient tracks done by Cicada Sirens & 1000 Eyes, intertwined with percussive, machine-like thumping of pistons for combat tracks or classical music found in some areas of the game. You can find the OST on (at least tracks composed for this game) on Bandcamp for 7 bucks if it strikes your fancy.

When it comes to game's themes, I'm somewhat reluctant to go in depth, as slowly feeling your way through its relatively mid-length campaign (8-10 hours on average) can make for a once-in-a-lifetime experience leaving you wishing to forget everything so that you can play it for the first time once more, but devs openly talk about the game going for a Lynchian approach of dream within a dream, often making you doubt whether what you're seeing is real or not.

There are a few nitpicks, however. Inventory management is strict, too strict for some. You are limited to 6 slots. You can't expand your inventory in any way and considering you'll need to keep a few essentials on you at all times AND look for key progression items will force you to run to nearest safe room stashes way too often. Combat works well for the most part, except when your lock-on refuses to focus on an enemy slowly closing in on you as it instead targets a downed foe writhing on the ground waiting to be put out. Some items/doors/objects have odd interaction hitboxes where you might have to backpedal or walk around then for a bit. And as much as the game feels like a survival horror that incentivizes stealth, the last third of the game throws way too many enemies at you, sometimes killing your pace or ruining your run's objective (this game has truly esoteric stat requirements for some alternate endings).




Look, if you read this far and withstood my gushing over every aspect of this piece, buy it.


It's a future cult-classic and I can't wait for what else rose-engine might create, at least I hope they will be spurred on by SIGNALIS' success.


10/10, would harass my friends into buying it again