A highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, or: on learning to walk
I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that Dark Souls was kind of a watershed videogame for me. Actually it feels kind of weird to say that now, after over a decade of Dark Souls warping mainstream videogames around itself. But it took me one false start* and a handful of hours to really click with Dark Souls.** Signalis got me less than fifteen minutes in.
Heavy spoilers for Signalis and also Dead Space below.
*and putting my GPU in the right PCI slot
**It was the Gaping Dragon fight. If you're willing to put a boss design like that in front of me, you've got my attention.
That's maybe unfair to Dark Souls; I knew Signalis was going to get me before I'd even installed the game. Perhaps fittingly, I don't remember how I first became aware of Signalis, but a friend had picked it up right around when it released and she posted a screenshot of the game's King in Yellow to a Discord server I was in when she reached that point in the prologue. That guaranteed I'd have to get into Signalis eventually.
It was this screen. Note that it says 'pick up,' not 'read.'
And perhaps here is the first key to why Signalis affects me. If the King in Yellow shows up in a game set in Boston or Paris around 1890-1930, that's nothing. Fork spotted in kitchen. But in a game about cyborgs and spaceships, it at least shows the devs are putting some thought into it. At least including the King in Yellow shows some actual attention paid to what I will reluctantly call the cthulhu mythos. I'd also have been less impressed if rose-engine had gone whole hog and busted out the Necronomicon. It's too bombastic; someone reads the book and gnarliness ensues. The King in Yellow is subtler. Someone reads the book, and things become askew. In the original Robert W. Chambers stories about the King in Yellow, nothing as overt as any of Lovecraft's gribbliness happens. I fully believe rose-engine knew exactly what they were doing using the King in Yellow as the axis around which to blend Signalis' personal horror and cosmic horror (and let us not forget my beloved body horror).
Maybe it will be instructive to compare Signalis to my previous favorite survival horror game, Dead Space. We can argue about whether Dead Space truly counts as survival horror later.
The parallels are immediately obvious: someone with engineer training looking for a loved one battles body horror in space. Red and black are an important color pairing.
A spaceship is involved.
But the differences are also obvious once you get into it. The first is this: in Dead Space, the Ishimura would have found the red marker and all the horror would have happened without Nicole on board. In fact it's Nicole's presence on the Ishimura that allows Isaac Clarke to save the day. In contrast, the plot of Signalis would not happen without Ariane Yeong on Penrose-512. Probably. Would Ariane have fallen in love with any Elster unit? Would an Elster other than Elster-512 have fallen in love with Ariane? I don't know if we have enough data within the game to say. But what matters is that Ariane fell in love with Elster-512, that love was reciprocated, and from that flows the tragedy and horror of Signalis.
Perhaps the subtlest difference between Dead Space and Signalis is this: in Dead Space, Isaac is constantly running around fixing the ship. He gets it back into a stable orbit. He gets the ADS cannons working. He kills the thing that's poisoning the air. Isaac Clarke is constantly doing engineer things to patch up the Ishimura. Elster, on the other hand, doesn't seem to get much chance to put her engineering spec to use. Over the course of the game, she tapes up a keycard, fits two pieces of a key together, tapes up a cassette tape, unfloods an area, and gets a lift working again. You can count that on one hand. Elster doesn't get much chance to patch up S-23 Sierpinski because this is not a situation that can be fixed.
I cannot stress how much it kicks ass that the Rotfront section has a broken lift, the exact same kind you fixed earlier in the game. As if the tumors gradually closing off parts of the map weren't enough. Rotfront in general is just hands-down one of my favorite levels in videogames.
The most important difference between Dead Space and Signalis, of course, is that Signalis is queer.
There's three layers to this. Firstly, Ariane and Elster are both women who are in a relationship with each other. This too is yuri, simple as.
Are sapphic relationships frowned on in-universe? I don't think we have enough to say but given that Falke is based off of the High Revolutionary and her Daughter and then made propaganda posters based on her, perhaps everyone in Eusa is attracted to her regardless of gender.
Second, Elster is a Replika and Ariane is a Gestalt. We don't hear of any other Replika-Gestalt relationships, and given that the dictionary entry for Gestalt defines it in opposition to Replika, I think it's safe to say that's at least a little bit taboo.
And finally, the Nation of Eusa does not want the specific individuals Ariane Yeong and Elster-512 to get together, insisting that they should not even be friends with each other. I may be wildly off-base here but it seems like it's hard to get more queer than the government reaching its big hand out from the capitol to hand you a letter specifically telling you not to fall in love with someone.
Please do not have cute little space dates with your cyborg girlfriend.
There's a bad faith argument you could make here that maybe the horror and tragedy of Signalis wouldn't have happened if Ariane had just read her mail. But I don't think Ariane and Elster could have been cooped up on Penrose-512 for as long as they were without getting into some kind of relationship. You want to talk about what could have prevented the events of Signalis the game? Let's talk about the kind of society that shoots people off on cheap spaceships without telling them that those ships are probably going to kill them.
And then has the audacity to advertise the program on public transit.
"Bad luck sport! Best ask your cyborg coworker to kill you now so you don't have suffer radiation poisoning!" is not the tone I would expect this message to take if the Penrose pilots were briefed that this was a likely outcome from the start.
I also don't think Ariane would have been so chipper about their 3000 cycle anniversary if she'd known the reactor was about to start flooding the ship with deadly radiation. - editing Lex popping in here to say that during the endgame you find a diary page dated cycle 2503 mentioning that Ariane has already started experiencing the symptoms of radiation sickness, so the shielding doesn't even last that long.
In another cool move, we don't actually learn anything about the Empire. We're focused on Eusa's faults here, trying to go into the Empire would just distract the player.
Signalis isn't terribly explicit about this, but between the documents and conversations there's enough details scattered about that if you're paying attention, you notice that if the game can be said to have a villain, it's the Nation of Eusa.
It's the petty things that really get under your skin.
"Children should try to grow up around cops with easy access to submachineguns" - things the average usamerican says
It's a masterclass in the subtler side of worldbuilding, really.
I can't think of anywhere else to put this but the fact that Adler has a poster of Falke above his bed is my favorite bit of environmental storytelling in videogames.
When I first fired up Signalis myself, the King in Yellow wasn't the first thing to really hook me. On the settings screen you're brought to when you first boot up the game (and I don't have a screenshot of this. Fittingly, I can't be sure it really happened.), there's some not-so-hidden text with the "things have learned to walk that ought to crawl" quote. And that's what got me - it's one of my favorite Lovecraft quotes. It's delightfully ominous, and it comes up a couple of times through the game. The fuller quote, shown during the post-prologue cutscene, mentions "great holes" that have been dug. In the context of Signalis this is most obviously referencing the excavation of the red gate on Leng.
But you may have already noticed that there's something problematic about the quote. Unsurprising, given pretty much everything about HP Lovecraft as a person. "Ought to crawl" implies some kind of natural order that must not be violated. Ought to crawl. Ought to follow orders. Ought not to fall in love.
From the perspective of Eusa, perhaps, this whole incident happens because "things" that ought to crawl instead learn to walk.
And I suppose that after learning to walk, the next step is learning to dance.
One of these days I will actually pull together my thoughts enough to post about my beef with the concept of adventurers' guilds in fantasy, and I will finally be able to retire to the life of an enlightened hermit. The short version is that the last time I tried thinking about how I'd make it work the clearest idea I had reached straight for grimdark.
