After a few bleak years — a few bleak generations — the horror genre is back, and in fine form. From AAA to AA to small teams to the most indie of indie developers working today, the horror genre is at its most consistent best since the PlayStation 2.
But one game stands above even our current high standard: rose-engine’s SIGNALIS.
If you have not played SIGNALIS, this is written for you. This is as spoiler free as possible, and only directly discusses elements from the first five minutes of the game.
At its mechanical core, SIGNALIS is built directly from the early installments of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. A strong focus on exploration and puzzles, truly limited inventory space, controls that can be mastered but ask you to think through your choices and can lead to disaster if you panic. Truly adequate weapons are rare. But the perspective has shifted to a top-down POV, as you navigate room to room like a dungeon in The Legend of Zelda. It is no less terrifying for that.
Horror requires more than mechanical excellence, it requires character. A game can get far on you, the player, reacting to something happening to the figure you’re controlling.
But creeping, lingering, haunting horror requires developed characters that we feel something for, and whose fates we care about. SIGNALIS excels. The characters are developed, and their motivations make sense. As Elster desperately searches for her lost partner, and as we learn more about them, it comes together to be unforgettable. It is emotionally moving.
After the tutorial, the game makes it very clear that this is a Cthulhu Mythos experience…
Most games that feature the Cthulhu Mythos, directly or indirectly, are underwhelming. The Mythos provides either a bestiary of monsters to blast through, or is used as a cheap justification to be dour. A willingness to engage with the material, written with real familiarity, is rare, and the handful of recent games to do so include: Call of the Sea, Weather Factory’s Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, and, perhaps best, SIGNALIS.
The King in Yellow was not invented by H.P. Lovecraft, though he did reference it. It was created decades earlier by Robert W. Chambers, in a short story collection of the same name. Each story winds about the others: some horror, some romance, some fantasy, some science fiction. The cursed play at the center of the collection, The King in Yellow itself, draws people in to replay its events at the behest of the King itself. Sometimes it appears directly; sometimes it appears at remove, or through a web of puns and inferences. Most stories are — or every story is — a reflection or a retelling of the play.
SIGNIALIS is a story that feels as though it belongs in The King in Yellow, one more piece of Chambers’ mosaic. Concrete details about the world the game takes place in are hard to come by, and filtered through a police state, but it broadly lines up with the alternate history outlined in “The Repairer of Reputations,” a world gone wrong in the worst ways. But as in Chambers’ stories, the events of the play are invoked, are repeated, are twisted. The play bleeds over. The sisters run. The Pallid stranger reveals…
No mask, no mask!
SIGNALIS is not only one of the best games of 2022, but one of the few with a legitimate claim to be the best game of 2022. It’s available for every platform under the sun. I encourage you to step into the darkness of an off-world mining facility, and find what was lost.
Featured Image: rose-engine
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The Boss Rush Podcast – The Boss Rush Podcast is the flagship podcast of Boss Rush Media and the Boss Rush Network. Each week, Corey, Stephanie, LeRon, and their friends from around the internet come together with other creators, developers, and industry veterans to talk about games they’ve been playing, discuss video game and entertainment based topics, and answer questions solicited on social media and the community Discord.
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