So after spending hours doing the backtrack roundup I finally finished this damn game and I have no fricking clue what the story was about. Also it's weird how the first boss is the hardest encounter in the whole game.
Signalis
So after spending hours doing the backtrack roundup I finally finished this damn game and I have no fricking clue what the story was about. Also it's weird how the first boss is the hardest encounter in the whole game.
tell us what you thought of the ending
I got the Memory ending but I doubt the others would've made much more sense to me. It was cool and kind of tragic but I felt like I'd walked into the dramatic finale of a independent French film from the 60s without subtitles or any context of what it was even about. Visually impressive but mostly bewildering. I really liked the Lynch and Kubrick style visuals but I was really hoping for a bit more coherency.
Between the robuts having inherited identities from humens and maybe infecting each other with other personalities and then the Lovecraft shit and also reality warping I couldn't make heads or tails of who my character was or why she was even doing what she was doing. Other than she wanted to frick one or more of the humen girls. Like who the frick was Seo, seriously.
Seo is essentialy a bait and you can say also somewhat symbolic of Elster at first losing sight of what she was really after until she fully remembers, that and a demostration of how fricked things might have been since due to her being an obsession of Arian she might have acidentally willed her back into reality during the events of the game
it sounds like you understood the story fine, it seems you simply didn't like it or were expecting more than what was there. I think this kind of story is too ambiguous to have a definitive or cogent ending. If you're not in the mood for it, it won't work for you.
Lesbianism is lame
Mee too, either i missed something major or the story just gets too vague once you get through the mines
The mines was kind of the point where I started losing my patience, frankly. Not because of the gameplay or story but because of how fricking bad the SH references get. Like there's sections, puzzles and visuals that I swear are stolen wholesale from SH1, 2 and 3, like basically unchanged. It was really jarring and I feel hurt the overall aesthetic the game was going for.
I mean fair enough if they deliberately wanted to make the story unclear and throw curveballs but it kind of doesn't mesh well with the gameplay because it makes it even harder to keep track of shit. Like I really wanted to keep hold of the photograph(s) from the beginning of the game because I figured it would do something similar to Mary's photo from SH2 but I ended up having to give up and put it in my storage box, so when it inevitably disappeared any significance of that was just lost on me.
yeah the story was pretty much is a case of extremely ambigious and left up in the air, as for the photo the only significance it had in the long run is pretty much among the first hints there is some major frickery going on with the photo changing inbetween the first section and encountering the star unit
Why is Killy woman?
the story is basically nier automata but 9s is a gay woman and the machines are replaced by logic virus androids
Silent Hill, but Lesbian Robots.
Granted, that's what I signed up for, but I didn't expect them to copy entire parts from SH games in a cyberpunk setting. And also the about the early SH games is that their stories are all actually very straightforward, especially SH2 which is the one that seemed to influence them the most. It really felt like they wanted to make an in-depth and complex cyberpunk horror story but insisted on pushing it through a SH game and I'm not convinced that the two mesh all that well.
>major frickery going on with the photo changing inbetween the first section and encountering the star unit
I mean when the photo changed that's when I knew I really wanted to hold onto it to see what would happen next, and keep checking it like Mary's to see if it would change. But then I ran up and down four floors and fairly interchangable grungy space corridors groaning every time those annoying marionettes came back to life and I realized I couldn't spare the inventory space. All the good will in the atmosphere and aesthetic is kind of lost on some really dubious gameplay design decisions.
its a moronic indieshit game what did you expect
I actually feel it was very competently made and there's some really cool stuff going on story-wise but boy do they not make it easy to get it. I wouldn't call it moronic, certainly. I might accuse it of being pretentious though, if I wanted to be an ass about it.
Well if after a certain point you just have the game operate on complete dream logic until the end, you might as well not have a story
>Ariane is born in a authoritarian shithole as an Albino and wish to be an artist
>she is bullied for her albinism and treated like shit
>the government doesn't give a shit about artist that are not propaganda one
>She become depressed to the point she just want to leave that shithole of a country
>Decide to enlist for the Penrose-512 program, which is a survey effort mission to possibly colonize far distant planetary bodies
>She get enlisted and is promoted to officer of the Penrose, which consist of a crew of 2 Her and a Replika model LSTR "Elster"
>As they travel they realize that perhaps their totalitarian government didn't really give a shit about safety measures, hence the reactor of the Penrose start leaking
>Ariane now slowly start to suffer from horrible radiation poisoning
>Elster put her in cryo sleep in an attempt so save her
>At some point they crash land into some distant foreign planet (the one you see during the first cinematic once you get out of the Penrose and the one that is show once you traverse through the gate)
>Ariane was actually a powerful Bio-Resonance user (basically psyker shit from 40k)
This is where it start to get complicated because she either
>Make the whole dream of the infection and shit on Leng and Rotfront where she spend most of her life
>Make a semi-reality around her, which it's still not real, but it kinda is
>It was all real but it make even less sense
>it was actually a Eldritch entity that gave her the power and everything was still a dream
And I wrote this whole shit just for the thread to get archived because no one hang on Signalis thread apart to yurishitpost or to ragebait
Honestly having both the King in Yellow shit and also mentioning that the girl you're looking for may just be a fricking reality warper really fricks with story coherence. One reason for reality to crumble and stop making sense is one thing, but two in tandem is just too much.
Well the thing that throw the whole
>it was all real and reality is definitely fricked
out of the window, is that we clearly see that they crashed somewhere very far from any of the locations we see in the game.
Plus with whole time loop things it's even more certain that it is just a dream or a "semi-dream" which is basically Ariane creating a whole new horrible reality with her power inside her head.
Hence why when you travel through the gate you are back in the real-reality once more for some reason
I mean when Adler mentioned timeloops it put the repeated scenes into slightly more coherent perspective but it still demonstrated just how obfuscated events were. When Falke started claiming she and Elster were the same I was just at my wit's end.
Yea Falke was obsessed with Ariane and did go insane because as I mentioned here
She basically got through the gate and got memories that were not her own hence she felt everything that Elster felt for Ariane, but with her own mind still, then she became ill, and insane later on.
Don't forget about Elster as lots of what it/she sees fricks with the story
>Elster is a replika
>replikas are copies of someone that take parts of their personalities
>with time the memories of the original start appearing in the copy
>the replika now starts seeing shit that might be real or might be a memory it didn't even live but just inherited from the original
And the bioresonance
>the country we're at war with discovers bioresonance
>they decide that this shit is way too dangerous and barely understood, better not frick around with it
>the authoritarian shithole builds their entire regime on it
>"wow now we can control an entire army of clones with this tech we barely understand! What's not to like?"
I love the story and I loved the early threads when we were speculating and trying to understand shit. Now that all discussion was exhausted the only thing left is yurbaiting and shitposting. The fact that the devs trooned out doesn't help.
Yea I really wished I was there when threads were discussing seriously about what the frick was going on with the story.
and I'm fairly sure the Eusan empire actually use Bio-Resonance but view it more religiously due to what the Empress did with it.
It's speculation but I'm sure the Eusan Nation is just a terrible lying shithole that just copied every Replika's model from the Empire, because we know that the Empress was the first one to crate the first Replika
the only difference is probably that they got white hair and red eyes as they were made in the image of the Empress, which was an Albino, just like Ariane....
>>The fact that the devs trooned out doesn't help.
Wait... what?
I forgot to add that
>Ariane finally want to die but is unbale to do so
>So she recreate Elster within her dream that she set on the mission to kill her
>Hence their "promise"
>because each time Elster pass through the gate she remember the memories of every previous Elster that failed to end the suffering of Ariane
>because each time Elster pass through the gate she remember the memories of every previous Elster that failed to end the suffering of Ariane
How appropriate that a robut ultimately fails due to a recursion error.
I didn't mind the overall story being confusing since it fits in a sort of aesthetic way, game was clearly aiming for that kind of dream-like artsy feel.
Well the game main message of the was that life in GDR and in any totalitarian shithole is absolutely nightmare level of depressing.
but yet the whole story make sense if you can keep track of it
Oh yeah, and come to think of it, what the frick was going on with Isa and Erika? Why the frick did Isa turn into a puddle of goo? I really feel like that sequence was supposed to evoke Angela walking up the burning staircase from SH2 but it was so baffling I couldn't really feel much about it.
>Why the frick did Isa turn into a puddle of goo?
I think that's just the effect of the virus on regular humans
I mean it was also fricking weird that bio-robots and humans could be infected with the same diseases when they have fundamentally very different biology.
Hell yeah man, I beat Falke on my first attempt despite wasting all my rifle ammo before realizing I needed to pick up and use the spears. Minya by contrast was obtuse as frick and took my like four tries before I figured out what the frick the game expected me to do. Thank frick I had two thermites to get rid of those annoying adds.
Basically Human losing their sanity = Goo
Replika losing their sanity = Zombie
I guess? I'm sure it must've been alluded to or mentioned in the script somewhere but it felt like kind of an anticlimactic end to one of the few recurring characters in the story.
Yea it's because that questline if you can call it that, was make you realize that the whole infection isn't really an infection but more like a curse that fall unto anyone that lose it's sanity
>Isa can no longer find her sister hence she no longer has a purpose or a goal that keep her mind going
I mean that's fair but it's still kind of disappointing. Maybe it was just jarring to see her going from punking that one annoying boss in one shot with the rifle to just giving up and melting.
No, I'm pretty sure I understood very little of it. I do like cerebral sci-fi/cyberpunk stuff, but I guess I was expecting something closer to SH or RE, i.e. fairly straightforward, or at least the general story is clear enough by the end of the game. Also I feel like trying to engage with a complicated story while essentially playing whack-a-mole between doing frankly derivative puzzles is a sub-optimum way to experience that kind of narrative.
Its a SH1 Lisa reference vro. Get it? (L)Isa! She was a walking corpse who hadn't realized it and promptly melts up in front of the protagonist after realizing it.
Well shit, that's a lot closer, good point. I'm not sure why I didn't notice, I guess it's because the game had gone so hard on SH2 over the others by that point I just defaulted to Angela. I mean christ, the morgue section is identical to the one from the prison and the 3D hand sticking out of the wall you have to put ominous rings on is just outrageous, frankly.
To expand on this - Assuming reality, Isa and Erika died sometime before Ariane left for the Penrose mission and this is projected through her memories, you find a shrine for the two in their family store along with the DEATH card so that's pretty on the nose.
It references general Silent Hill. It's a little overbearing sometimes but I don't particularly mind. For me my brain clicked on the first minutes of the game with that hole you crawl through (SH4 is my favorite). I think it brings enough of its own stuff into the table (meatrooms are honestly way cooler than shit getting rusty) to not be dragged down by its abundant references. Its also a game made by literally two people that went through a 10 year dev cycle where it was a completely different game for a majority of it so it's hard to hate on it.
Don't get me wrong, the game has plenty of it's own original atmosphere and aesthetic and it's fantastic and it's impressive it was just two people. But that's exactly why seeing stuff pulled directly from SH with almost no changes was so jarring for me, it broke my immersion because I immediately recognised where it was from and it's also kind of out of place.
well the game itself is such an amalgamation of different style (Blame!,SH,Space GDR) that it create it's own
>and I have no fricking clue what the story was about
Don't worry, nobody does without a wiki or YT. It's a pretentious cringefest tho.
>Don't worry, nobody does without a wiki or YT.
This is kind of what bothers me. I deliberately went in as blind as I could because I feel that stuff like classic survival horror in the RE and SH mold is best experienced completely blind. But the result was that I spent pretty much the whole game with no idea what was going on or why, or even who the character I was controlling was really supposed to be.
>Also it's weird how the first boss is the hardest encounter in the whole game.
really? harder than Falke? no way
Also, this is a minor gripe, but would it have killed them to put in one non-limited use melee weapon in the game? Even RE had some shitty knives and SH games had rad shit like the hammer or the katana, it was always irritating knowing that ammo was limited but enemies can just revive infinitely unless burned.