Like a faint radio transmission, it’s been some time since we final heard from Signalis. Two years since Dominic Tarason snatched its teaser trailer, with a brief stop in Screenshot Saturday Sundays below Jay’s tenure final 12 months. But this week, builders Rose-Engine boosted the sign, broadcasting a brand new trailer that plunges deeper into the attractive, horrifying depths of their sci-fi survival-horror.
Granted, these aren’t fairly the visuals I’d anticipate to run alongside Chopin’s Raindrop prelude. Oh, I’m not complaining.
Running off the affect of previous PlayStation fixed-camera spooks like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, Signalis trades macabre blood-and-guts for altogether extra cosmic horror. It’s flight over combat, fight taking part in second-fiddle to puzzle-solving. Ammo is scarce, so that you’ll spend much less time gunning down shadows than fixing up previous tech, cleansing up radio transmissions earlier than the derelict facility’s unruly residents can deliver our heroine to a brutal finish.
Look – loads of devs have riffed on old-school horror (what’s up, HauntedPS1?). I’m most likely even responsible of writing the occasional Signalis shot off as “one of those”, trying it over when attempting to not flood Screenshot Saturday Sundays with retro horror antics. But there’s one thing deeply, fascinatingly alien happening in Signalis.
Characters painted in sharp anime tones transfer from deserted corridors to otherworldly voids rendered in stark reds and blacks. Visuals swap seamlessly between low-fi mounted cameras, hyper-detailed environmental close-ups and hand-drawn figures that sit uncomfortably between 2D and 3D. Replicants grappling towards dimensionless existential threats by the lens of a CRT display screen? It’s a strong look.
Illustrators and builders Alex Yang and Barbara Wittmann (working below the Rose-Engine moniker) have been plugging away at Signalis since at the very least early-2014 – taking the occasional break to launch Itch platformers Ascend and Coffin Counselling. While Signalis has nonetheless to transmit a remaining launch date, the iso-horror has since snagged a spot on Steam.
