Alexander M Cannell
patreon
Signalis Review Now Live!
🕑 Added 2023-02-03 20:08:26 +0000 UTCA new review is live! Elster goes to hell, and so do I.
At long last, we're finally wrapping up talking about 2022, and this ended up being a nightmare project. Not because it was especially complex or because I didn't enjoy my time with Signalis, but just because almost anything that could have gone wrong did. I wrote 75% of a script, then had to go back and rewrite the entire thing when the game pulled a 180 literally minutes after the point I paused to start writing. And then I went and moved my office space into a little box of a room with horrible acoustics, leading to some growing pains on the audio front. And then playing with footage...well, it's hard to compile footage that looks good when the gameplay has a fade to black every 5-10 seconds and difficult to expound at length about how amazing Signalis's narrative and cutscenes are when 85% of the relevant footage would have people screaming "spoilers!" despite the fact it's right there in the trailer, even.
But if I have to sit here and wrestle with a game for nearly a full month, I'm glad it was this one. Signalis is a phenomenal game. One that perhaps wants to play coy and take an excessive amount of time waiting to get to the point, but ultimately once it gets there, slams home with terrifying poignancy. It's also an incredibly atmospheric and beautiful game. I am often hard pressed to find something worthwhile to say about a game's graphical fidelity — you can see all there is to say right there on the screen — but the direction, now that's something far more interesting to dig into, and Signalis's artistic direction is impeccable.
Coming in the future, it's going to probably be a (hopefully) quick detour to check out Hi-Fi Rush, then perhaps a brief video essay on Forspoken. The latter project is already a bit compromised, seeing as the conversation on the game is already pretty much over, but I find myself inescapably drawn like a moth to flame to yet another bizarre-looking Square Enix RPG, and it's weird that that keeps happening. So I'm hoping to approach it from a slightly more video essay-ish, timeless angle than simply asking if it's worth playing.
Also look forward to streaming beginning this month! I still have a few things to research about how to make a stream actually function from the digital end of the process, but it'll be sorted within a few weeks.
