It’s kind of crazy to think about how many once great and massive franchises are now dead in the water, seemingly forgotten by those that hold the rights to them. Series like Mega Man, F-Zero, Kid Icarus, Star Fox, Punch-Out, Dino Crisis, Darkstalkers, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and like everything made by Konami. Lots and lots of people grew up with games from these franchises and now they are just gone, never to be seen or heard of again beyond maybe a remaster or port. So with that in mind it really shouldn’t be a surprise that with the boom of indie developed games came the urge for these new, and old, developers to bring back these franchises they loved so much. Or rather do the next best thing and make games inspired by them.

Spiritual successor is a term thrown around a lot these days when it comes to game development. It’s a term people use for marketing to help tell others that their new game is meant to be like an older game that no longer is around. For example, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an indie game that set out to be a spiritual successor to Castlevania! That was it’s entire selling point if we’re being honest. And a very affective one, especially since one of the main creators of Castlevania was working on it. That’s actually when you hear the term spiritual successor the most, when a developer of the original is working on this successor. When that isn’t the case a lot of developers will simply say their game is inspired by whatever series they are trying to emulate. And while there is nothing wrong with any of this, I have to admit I’ve lost my love for spiritual successors and games inspired by old forgotten franchises…

My main issue with these kinds of games is that, more often than not, they get really bogged down by the game they are trying to emulate. A good example is the game Yooka-Laylee, a game that was meant to be a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie and even shares some developers from that! The game got it’s funding crazy fast, breaking it’s stretch goals and was well on it’s way to being made. Sadly, the game never managed to live up to the hype that it built when it was announced. While most people agree the game isn’t bad by any means, they also agree it doesn’t even come close to the heights Banjo-Kazooie managed to reach. It just never captured that magic the original had despite having people that worked on it and having come out so many years later. I think this is because it tried to be too much like Banjo-Kazooie. Yooka-Laylee ended up being just more of the same, nothing really new or original, and that’s not what people wanted. People can still play the original Banjo-Kazooie and it’s sequel, they didn’t want a rehash of those, they wanted something new that was still in line with those games!

Perhaps these kinds of things are a case of people not really understanding what they want, or just being blinded by nostalgia to the point that they remember something being much better than it was. Regardless, this is why I had become really skeptical of games that were trying to emulate older titles. They just never work. They are either too similar to what they are inspired by making people ask why they’d not just go back and play the original thing, or even worse they make you question why you liked the original thing in the first place. Spiritual successors and games so heavily inspired by the games of the past very rarely manage to get out of the shadow of the thing that inspired them.

However, just this month I played a game that managed to not only stand side by side with it’s inspiration, but also managed to take a step past it. A game that doesn’t get held back by it’s inspiration but instead lets it push it forward. A game that managed to show me that a type of horror I thought was long dead never to be seen again was brought back right before my eyes. And that game is SIGNALIS.

I was so upset with myself when I picked up SIGNALIS at the start of this month. This game was released October of last year and somehow I hadn’t picked it up until now! Part of that was because of what I was talking about earlier. SIGNALIS is very much a game inspired by others that I love, namely classic survival horror games of the PS1 era and especially Silent Hill. There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of indie games with these inspirations and rarely do they ever do much with them besides make a few references here and there and have fixed camera angles or something like that. And because of that, I originally stayed away from the game. I had heard it was good many times but I just could never bring myself to try it. I didn’t want to be dissapointed yet again by an attempt at capturing the horror that Silent Hill managed to provide. Not when Silent Hill itself hadn’t been able to do that for ages! So imagine how upset I was when I finally did pick up SIGNALIS and realized what I had been missing out on this whole time…

As I said before, SIGNALIS is a survival horror game inspired by the classics of the PS1 and especially Silent Hill, and Silent Hill 2 specifically. That alone is a lot to live up to, but before we get to that, let’s take a step back and talk a bit more about the game and what it manages to do so right besides capturing the horror that inspired it.

First of all I want to talk about the visuals of the game since I imagine that’s going to be the first thing that catches people’s eyes. The game is very much going for some PS1 style visuals but interestingly enough it manages to take that and run with it making it’s own style in the process. A lot of retro inspired games go for older visual styles and generally there are two ways of going about that. First you can try and make your game look very authentic including a lot of bugs or visual quirks that go along with this style. Like if you’re going for an 8-bit style, you could use a limited color pallet like a lot of NES games had to. The other way to go about including a more retro visual style is to use it as just a style rather than trying to make people go, “Wow! I can’t believe games actually look and ran like this back in the day!” There are lots of reason to go with either option but I like that SIGNALIS picks the latter, using the PS1 style as more of a jumping off point. After all, I never stopped and went, “Wow! This could be a PS1 game!” and that’s okay! In fact, it works in SIGNALIS‘s favor beautifully.

The game’s art style does an amazing job at being both terrifying and beautiful when it needs to be. There wasn’t a single moment in the game where I thought it looked dull. Even in dull locations like an office or a bedroom. Everything feels like it was designed with purpose and I was thinking that even before I got to the first person sections! SIGNALIS is played mostly from an Isometric view. An angle that I’m not going to bother trying to explain because I know I’ll do it poorly so here’s a shot from the game to help better explain!

This is the angle you see the game at. Every room you enter is seen from this kind of angle. And while I feel like having fixed camera angles would have been more fitting for this being a PS1 survival horror, I can’t deny that this camera angle works well and tells you all you need to know whenever you enter an area! And it works really well with that visual style too. However, I feel like this style really gets to show off during the few first person segments!

When I first played through the game, this elevator area made me stop and pause so I could just be in awe of how great everything on screen looks and the effort that must have gone into making it. Because there really is no reason that this elevator couldn’t have been represented in the same way as the rest of the rooms in the game. But doing so like this really raises the tension of everything by taking you out of your comfort zone and changing things up just slightly. And doing so in this way really separates SIGNALIS from games that it was inspired by. It manages to be creepy in a way all it’s own, and it works perfectly with the tone and style it’s going for! While games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill didn’t do anything like this, it still feels very in line with what they would do!

And that leads us perfectly into another aspect that makes SIGNALIS so amazing. It doesn’t just understand what people loved about these classic survival horror games, it understands how to do it’s own thing with those inspirations. And this is what sets it apart from other spiritual successors and games inspired by older, forgotten titles. When you go “Oh cool! This is just like Silent Hill!” it’s not just because they make a few references to it, it’s because you actually feel like you’re playing a Silent Hill game!

As I was saying before, SIGNALIS clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the greats but especially Silent Hill 2 and it is not afraid to make that known. So much so that they even start the game with a reference to it!

By doing this, SIGNALIS is putting an insane amount of exceptions on itself. Specifically when it comes to the game’s story.

I will forever argue that Silent Hill 2 is the best game in the series. From the monster design to the story, everything is so well made, given so much thought and purpose, that it’s no wonder why it’s consider one of the best horror games of all time. And with anything that becomes so popular, you’re going to have imitators, and this is where some people in the Silent Hill community kind of give the stink eye to Silent Hill 2. Due to the game’s acclaim, a lot of future games in the series would try and do what it did, and would do a terrible job of it. When it comes to the original four Silent Hill games, Silent Hill 2 is very much the outlier in terms of story which is why it’s kind of upsetting that future games by new developers in the series would just try and do Silent Hill 2 again when they could have done so much more. This is made even more frustrating when you realize that these failures are what ultimately led to the series dying as the games failed to come even close to what made Silent Hill 2 so great.

Now while that was kind of off topic I feel like it’s important to bring up as it gives a lot more weight to what I’m about to say…

SIGNALIS actually does manage to capture what made Silent Hill 2 so great. And it does so without needing to completely copy it.

While SIGNALIS does reference Silent Hill a whole lot, it still manages to do it’s own thing despite that. I feel like this is most prevalent in the story. A story that is so good that I’m only going to give a brief description of the start because I don’t want to spoil anything about how it evolves from there!

The story starts off with Elster, our quiet and robotic main character, waking up on the ship she has been traveling on with her partner, Ariane. However, Ariane oddly doesn’t seem to be on the ship. Not only that, the ship has crashed on a planet! This section works as a tutorial to help players get familiar with the game’s mechanics but mostly it’s puzzle solving aspects. Once Elster figures out a way off the ship, she finds a hole in the ground. A large hole that has some steps leading down! Going deeper, she ends up finding another hole that she can crawl through. After making it through there, she finds herself in an odd room. But not odd because it’s weird or other worldly, odd because it’s normal and in a place like this. Looking around, Elster finds and picks up the book ‘The King in Yellow’ before getting a radio transmission. And after the rather trippy cutscene that comes with it, you’re brought into the game proper with Elster standing in a bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror telling herself that the one she’s looking for is here. I showed this in one of the images above as this bathroom scene is exactly how Silent Hill 2 starts! James comes to Silent Hill looking for his dead wife after getting a letter from her. And while the fate of Ariane is unknown, Elster comes to this odd place looking for her as well. And to keep the similarities going, both James and Elster have pictures of the ones they are looking for in their inventories! But rather than being in a foggy town, Elster has to search a mining base for her love. Going deeper and deeper down as things quickly go from bad to crazy… And this is where I’m going to stop when it comes to the story!

I wanted to at least give a little bit of context for the story because, as I was saying, it’s what manages to capture that Silent Hill 2 feeling better than anything else. And it’s not at all because they have a similar start. Instead, it’s how the game makes you think about it.

One of Silent Hill‘s most defining aspects to me is how thought provoking it is. Just about everything in each of the games, or the four original ones anyways, has a purpose behind them. But not because the developers had answers for everything, instead it’s because they want you to think about everything. And SIGNALIS captures this perfectly. The game never gives you all of the answers, and while I know that can be frustrating to some I think it works perfectly here and in Silent Hill. There is never meant to be one answer or reason behind the events that happen in the game but there’s always just enough context to keep you thinking about it! Most other titles that try to go for what Silent Hill 2 is going for miss this completely. They instead focus on trying to have a big twist or contextualizing something different. Like having the main character be a bad guy in the end or trying to say they are crazy and none of this is real. And while it’s fine to do that most of the time, by giving too much context or not enough to keep people thinking, you’re missing the point entirely. We don’t love Silent Hill 2 just because of the amazing twists and turns it has, we love it because it keeps us thinking. It keeps us coming back for more! And SIGNALIS nails this harder than even most Silent Hill games!

I can’t remember the last time I stayed awake in bed unable to sleep because I was just thinking too much about a game and it’s meaning. It’s a feeling I didn’t realize I missed until I finished SIGNALIS for the first time. Even games like those in the Souls series that are meant to have stories you’re suppose to seek out and really think about haven’t been able to get me like this. This was an aspect of horror and games in general that I felt died with Silent Hill because so many have tried to recapture it only to fail horribly. And I just assumed that’s how it would be from now on. That this kind of experience was just gone. And that’s honestly why SIGNALIS hit me as hard as it did.

SIGNALIS managed to give me faith for a type of horror I thought I’d never see again. It showed me that there really are people out there who understood this kind of story telling, this kind of horror, and how to craft it in to an amazing gaming experience. Or at the very least there are two people that know how to do that since I feel like I should mention this game was made by just two people. Which is insane given it’s quality! Yuri Stern and Barbara Wittmann you two have truly done the impossible with this game and should be immensely proud of it! You two not only made one of the best horror games around but showed that there are people who still know how to make this very unique kind of horror. And I cannot wait to see what you two do next.

Now before wrapping things up, I should probably talk about this game’s, you know, game play. I haven’t been avoiding the topic because SIGNALIS has bad game play or anything, far from it in fact, but rather because the game play in these kinds of games isn’t always the most important. For example, if we’re being perfectly honest, Silent Hill 2 does not have great game play. It’s combat in particular sucks. But it’s a great game despite it because it makes up for it with the story and especially the puzzles. SIGNALIS is kind of in the same boat. The puzzles are honestly great! None of them felt insanely hard or made me look up a guide, and they were all pretty creative. One of my favorites was when you need a key card to open a door, but said key card is out of reach, stuck in an x-ray machine. At first I assumed I simply had to open the x-ray machine up some how, but I ended up finding a blank key card. Using that with the key card printer, I was able to make a new key card by using the x-ray machine to tell me the exact pattern I needed for the card to work! A very rewarding problem solving experience which is exactly what you want in a game like this.

SIGNALIS also manages to one up Silent Hill 2 here by having some pretty good combat. Or rather combat that doesn’t feel bad. This is probably because SIGNALIS takes a lot of inspiration for it’s combat not from Silent Hill but from Resident Evil! However, this is where one of my only gripes about the game comes from…

In the Resident Evil 1 Remake there are enemies called Crimson Heads. Crimson Heads are zombies that you previously killed but came back to life since you didn’t burn them. Crimson Heads are faster and stronger than basic zombies so planning out which zombies you want to burn with your limited amount of oil becomes pretty important! SIGNALIS has this exact same system but with a few tweaks to it. First, when the enemies come back they aren’t any stronger than they were before, something that seems like the game is going easy on you until you get to the second tweak and that’s the fact that they will always come back to life unless you burn them! Crimson Heads are dangerous and something you want to always avoid but at least when you killed them that was it. No coming back from that. In SIGNALIS, the enemies will always come back unless you burn them and there aren’t a crazy amount of flares to burn them with. Obviously this is because you’re meant to only burn the enemies that are in places you’ll be coming back to over and over again. No reason to use a flare on an enemy in a room your only going to be in once but on a first play through, you probably aren’t going to know which rooms and areas you’ll be running through a ton so it can be very tough to choose. And because enemies have the chance to come back over and over again, I found myself never wanting to kill any of them in the first place and instead just running around them as it felt like even knocking them down once would be a waste of ammo. And while you can argue that the stress all this causes helps the game be more scary, I’d argue that is just makes things far more annoying than anything else.

While this aspect of the game is very very far from a deal breaker, I still felt like I had to at least mention this blemish on an otherwise perfect game. And I really mean that by the way. SIGNALIS is pretty close to perfection when it comes to survival horror games, especially if you’re someone like me who desperately misses Silent Hill. I can be pretty critical when it comes to horror games but SIGNALIS managed to exceed my expectations at every turn. It is a game I see myself replaying for years to come and thinking about even longer. I can see this game not just being remembered as a classic indie game like Shovel Knight, but as a classic horror game held up there with the best of the best. And if there is anything you take away from this month of spooky posts and game recommendations, it’s that you need to play SIGNALIS! It’s just $20 and it’s available on almost everything from Switch to PC to Xbox to PlayStation. You seriously have no excuse not to give this amazing game a go! And don’t be an idiot like me an wait a whole year to play it. Seriously, I can’t believe I did that… Play it right now so you can end Spooky Month with a bang!

But those are just my thoughts, what are some of yours? Going to be giving SIGNALIS a try for Halloween? Did you enjoy Spooky Month this year? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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