#and lets not forget the incredibly talented community! the cat ears meme still haunts me to this day

[annafall]

What is your favourite part(s) about Signalis?

the lesbians /jk

I think what initially appealed to me most was just how tragic the story is (gonna put this under a read-more, it turned out much longer than i thought haha)

You have two people, a girl who was ostracised by society and wanted to escape that life so much she chose never-ending solitude on a spaceship instead, and a work slave with a artificially numbed personality who slowly learns what it means to be a person (or rather, to be the person she once was and how that affects her current existence) and then they fall in love, simply because Ariane felt lonely after all life is good for them! maybe a bit repetitive, but they get to enjoy life to the best of their ability, with the goal in mind "set up a base camp outside of this solar system and establish a life there" and then, after 7 years (and a few months) of living with the mindset "were gonna build a future together", the empire just tells them "yeah actually, we sent you fuckos out there to brag to the other guys, just kill yourselves lol"

and the two just DONT want to give up like that, so they do everything the broadcast told them not to do, ration their supplies, use cryo to skip nutritional needs (they went to something crazy like 15000 cycles if i remember correctly, which is almost as long as the time they spent on that ship before they were told their mission was a sham)

when the ship crashes and it should be over, it isn't. because ariane is half-conscious in cryo, feeling the pain of radiation poisoning killing her so much slower than usual (remember, she had already lost multiple teeth from that before the penrose crashed)

and all ariane has left is the hope to die and to be spared this never-ending torment brought on by a monstrous regime that saw her life as completely expendable

and that's only that part of the game, just the narrative of what brings us to the start of the actual game! all that dread and tragedy in the actual game, of ADLR losing his mind, of FLKR's sense of self slowly distorting, the MYNR unit thanking us in the mineshaft, the way Ariane's radiation sickness is projected onto the people in this version of Sierpinski

i'm also a huge sucker for cosmic horror (especially hastur and dream worlds and the idea of your consciousness transcending your body inside the dream, blame bloodborne on that)

and while i am a huge coward and can barely play this game if i got fallout boy roaring in my ears, there's just so much about the game and its gameplay itself to stand and admire the claustrophobic feeling of the hallways, both on leng, rotfront and in nowhere; the sound design (using just a smattering of ambient noise to help build the atmosphere and then using these big orchestral pieces for those special moments. oh, and the fucking guns, holy shit the guns sound so good in this game. not a fan of guns in general, but WOW)

the setting is also just so delightfully dreadful, i mean how often do you get "regime has a slave workforce that carry scrubbed personality constructs and all look the same to dehumanize them further, so nobody would ever think to humanize them"? and then we get those delightful moments where they ARE humanized (the STAR and EULR units in the mineshaft, for example) and it's just chef's kiss

and the final thing to me is just how much you can brainrot about it, thanks to the dream. what's real? what isn't? who does this dream belong to? whose memory am i seeing right now? is this dream even still accurate to the memory its based on? who is alina and how does she factor into it?

so yeah, wow this turned long, but thank you for the ask! this was a lot of fun!