Played on PC, streamed over Discord for a friend (emotional support). I actually intended to finish this before Christmas but had some scheduling issues...so I ended up finishing it over my birthday...which is well and good actually I liked that.
!!Spoilers below!!
[6:08 am]corowne: my signalis adventures
I think up until the end of Nowhere, I hated the gameplay LOL. It's no fault of the game design; it's just not a genre of game I would choose to play with no other reason to do so (the reason here being my friend strongly recommending it). All of the other top-down horror games I've played were puzzle/exploration focused over the action/survival elements, while this one is the opposite. My instinct is to avoid confrontation because I don't have the tempered nerves to handle confrontation in a smart manner - I would probably dump all my ammo and healing immediately. It took a while to get used to, and I just got steadily more stressed with each new exploration area.
The reason it's "up until the end of Nowhere", though, is because Rotfront was basically a return to (relative) normalcy with a usable map and an environment that made sense, and I think that's a really interesting aspect of the level design. Like - the game went from the structured environments introducing the various levels of Sierpinski and the worldbuilding, to the mines where the map first cuts out, then into the weirdness of Nowhere where the door/room geometry doesn't even makes sense, most of the readable text is extremely cryptic, and the exit to the place is not immediately apparent. Going to a place where everything made sense again was such a relief that the gameplay was no longer a stress factor to me and that, I think, is a reflection of Elster's mental state - it getting harder/more stressful to proceed, then gaining sudden clarity of purpose when she remembers everything and what she has to do.
I...don't know where to even begin with writing this section because there are so many thoughts I need to organise...that it would probably become theorydumping instead of my thoughts on the story...
The friend who told me to play the game said a lot of fans of the Locked Tomb (novel) series gravitated towards this game, and I Understand why now. On the surface, they both share a lot of themes - a similar location for the setting obscured in a similar way, magic under a sci-fi mask (or is it the other way around?), the story of characters who are small cogs in a very large war machine whose love forms the basis of the unravelling of the universe, etc. with the good old cosmic horror/forces beyond our comprehension (and lesbians, of course). All of which are elements that I love dearly...which is why I needed to finish this game even though the first stream session had me so stressed I had to take a break for a few days. I needed to know the lore so bad...
Coming out of the hole of reading translations of the German (what is it like playing this game while being able to read it? I could read the Chinese and the Japanese but it wasn't a major part of the text...), there's quite a lot hidden in text that flashes onscreen way too quickly to parse (such as Erika coming to Ariane's rescue, and literary quotes that reveal the characters' inner emotions), so it feels like there is intent on the devs' part to have players revisit and think about events in a nonlinear manner in order to piece together the story...which is a really interesting mix of "things that I know are certainly true" and "things that are (probably) unknowable" ("are the events of the game real" being in the latter category!), yet still entirely coherent as a story. Unfortunately, with the foregone tragic conclusion (which is, again, up in the air actually???) I have to cope by diving into theories...I might add some logs to this entry for my theories/thoughts on theories.
On the characters - I love the breadcrumb trails of characterisation, particularly about Ariane, who spends half of the game absent and suddenly becomes the most important character. Ariane has so few actual speaking lines and a bunch of diary entries, but so much can be inferred of her character through her choices and relationship with Elster, and with Isa/Erika...I think the thing that strikes me the most is that Ariane is, technically, in a position to issue orders to Elster, but would rather suffer in eternity (or never even considered the idea) asking Elster to keep a promise than force her to do something she doesn't want to. It's very in line with the fact that she has always been forced into situations throughout her life - leaving her home on Leng, compulsory military service, assigned to Sierpinski (only dodged by volunteering for Penrose instead). Letters and notes talk ABOUT her, but rarely TO her (also a phenomenon that occurs to Elster, who is, as all Replikas are, treated as nonhuman in documents), and through those it's clear who actually cares about her...and all of those people - her mom, the Itou twins (there is a single note from her aunt but said aunt gave her a single yoga mat to sleep on while there is a normal bunk bed in the main apartment???) - all leave her (or she has to leave them) for some reason or the other. The last person she has left is Elster...whom she notably took about 600 days to even begin to warm up to...and it seems she was determined to keep them on equal footing rather than obey the superior/subordinate hierarchy. Funnily, on my playthrough I didn't open the known issues letter (didn't know if it would affect the game and did not want to break Ariane's trust) - the fact that it's unopened is something that I think is commonly read as Ariane's contempt for authority, but I feel could also be read as her not wishing to pry into Elster's secrets/wishing to know Elster on her own terms, rather than what other people tell her about Elster.
This is just a fraction of the things I've been thinking about Signalis's plot and characters. It's delightful to find a story that's told in fragments, sometimes in the words of other people, and have to puzzle it all out. A lot of the setting is a mystery that might never be revealed, but I think that's part of the appeal. Though - it's also interesting that the devs have stepped in to clarify a few minor things (the name of Isa/Erika's mom for one), which shows there is a certain range of conclusions that they intend players to arrive at...
Oh, for the record, I got the Promise ending.
This is a game that's going to haunt me for a long time. It's nothing like what I expected going in (I put it off for the longest time because of the gameplay genre, to be honest, and mostly picked it up to strike it off my to play list, also in trade for having my friend stream Animal Well lol) and I'm extremely glad I took the time to play it.