EDIT: Spoilers are now open! Discuss away!

PRIOR MESSAGE: Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our first game of 2023 is Signalis. The target completion date is January 16, 2023.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after January 16, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Signalis?

A critically acclaimed survival horror game that takes both aesthetic and gameplay cues from the genre in the late 1990s but updated and modernized.

How long is Signalis?

How long to beat lists it as 9 hours long.

Not getting into any specifics, there's something that I genuinely have a hard time understanding. I'm only around maybe an hour in at this point, but it's enough to get a more than a strong sense of the atmosphere, which is potently Survival Horror.

What I get caught up on is that I'm rarely horrified by these kinds of games but instead just constantly stressed out. When people say that a game is 'scary', do they just mean that it keeps you on edge for if something pops up and goes "ooga booga" at you? Wouldn't that count as Suspense instead of Horror? As far as my understanding of horror goes, the only horrifying part I've seen so far was that surreal bit towards the beginning. The rest of the experience is being stressed about dying before a save point or running out of inventory.

Better examples of this are the Amnesia style horror games where you run and hide from stuff. That inspires stress from being in mortal danger, but not horror. Because of this, I find more horror in something like Observation than in Resident Evil 7. Am I a snob? Is there supposed to something more to these experiences than mechanical inconvenience and the fight-or-flight response?

How anime is this? I think I started it up and wasn't super turned on by the visuals but I know Jess really liked it.

@rorie: I haven't started yet, but I remember seeing some talk of comparison to Ghost in the Shell & Evangelion. So it's at least some type of anime?

Woo! I've already played this so I don't have to feel guilty about forgetting to play the game.

I don't really feel this is very anime outside of some of the looks that people have? The story is very "nebulous dream-like scatterbrained untrustworthy information" which doesn't really line up with a lot of the anime I've watched. The best/closest comparison I've found, despite the look, is Silent Hill 2.

@rorie: It's very anime and makes multiple references to various classic anime moments but I don't think you will be at a disadvantage in not knowing the references apart from a moment of "ahh I recognize that from so and so." The game plays a lot like a classic Resident Evil but has the atmosphere and styling of a Silent Hill which is probably why Jess enjoyed it so much. From a pure gameplay perspective I would very much recommend it because the moment to moment gameplay is very enjoyable, the puzzles are genuinely interesting to solve and the graphic design is incredibly unique. Even if the story itself isn't going to hook I think the part where you actually play the game should be enough which is a stark contrast to stuff like Silent Hill which is rough to go back to these days.

I’ll be using this as my motivation to finally play this game I’ve had it downloaded and sitting there too long.

We've still got another week before the discussion opens, but I gotta say I'm thoroughly enjoying my time with this so far. I'm just a couple hours into it but the style and sounds are great and the breadcrumb trail of story so far has kept me going.

On a separate note, I purchased myself an XSX last week and this is the first new release I'm playing on it. I think my involvement in the UUGPGC is going to rise significantly with the addition of a dedicated console instead of trying to play on a computer after spending all day working on the same computer.

Since I’ve spoken glowingly of this game basically nonstop (and have it at #4 in my GOTY list), I’ll drop my one nitpick I have with the game: the flashlight should not take up an inventory slot. No other secondary item is mandatory for progression, and more than that it’s just super annoying to switch it in and out of the 6 item slots.

My favourite game of the year easily.

Spoilers are now open in this thread!

I will confess I have not finished the game, but I intend to. I was going to get through it this weekend but life got in the way. Also it's a game I have to be in the right head space to play because the atmosphere is so oppressive, but I really like what I've played so far. It has a lot of atmosphere, some really good writing, and it threads the needle between being clunky to play but not quite as annoying as something like OG Resident Evil. It's a cool game and I'm looking forward to digging further in!

I just finished this right now so my thoughts are a little scattered. Overall, I really enjoyed my time with it, but the 6 item slots really made the back half of the game a little tedious. Especially in the last area where you're collecting the tarot cards. It always felt like I only had two inventory slots free when I'd start exploring, so that just ended up making me backtrack more than I would have liked. I'm sure I could have played differently and pushed my luck more when exploring, but I didn't.

I got the ending titled "Memory." Looking at the other endings online, I'm kind of expecting most people to get that ending too, but I'd love to hear if someone got something else.

The vibes of this game were definitely the star of the show for me though. The enemy design is creepy and the sounds throughout help create a great atmosphere. I even think the CRT filter was effective, though I only turned it on briefly to see what it looked like.

All in all, I'd score this an 8/10 and I think it was a great first game of the year.

The Good:

• It has a very well realized art style that is as close to perfectly executed as possible.
• Great sound design and music that ties in with the visuals to create a tangibly dark and dangerous atmosphere that elicits physical dread.
• Mostly strong writing that does its job in eventually tying together the world and themes of the story.
• Excellent scene direction that made the cutscenes both a reward to look forward to and something to dread for the mindfuck of it all.

The Meh:

• The esoteric storytelling style lets the game get away with not presenting a coherent world or fleshed out characters. The player is a bit overly relied on to fill the gaps. An example being the Itou sisters and their ambiguous importance to the story.
• The reveal of the nature of the game world at the end, while providing a strong emotional climax, is another classic storytelling cop out (It was all in Ariane's head as she lay dying) that cheapens or confuses individual events of the story. and gameplay E.g. Who dreams of water pouring puzzles? Why dream of zombie Protektors? Why dream of an obvious Silent Hill reference for the entire middle section?
• Most of the 'puzzles' are just obscure fetch-quests, and yes I know that's how Resident Evil did it but it was cheap then as well.
• The fake ending was too convincing. It actually pissed me off because I thought that was it.
• Having the combat feel clunky in the way that it does serves as a good allusion to PS1 era survival horror games without being anywhere near as broken, but there is a reason why we've moved beyond that type of gameplay: it sucks.

The Bad:

• There is one puzzle per major area (mining base, nowhere, city) that either has no signposting or unhelpful signposting that can only be solved by futzing around with some interface until you stumble on the solution. I'm referring to the lockpicking puzzle, the microphone/symbols puzzle, and the antenna triangulation puzzle. The middle one is by far the most egregious as it requires the player to navigate to a menu, adjust a setting that has almost two-hundred options, close the menu, check if there's a result, write down or take a picture of the result, and repeat until you have all four or five results that you need.
• Six inventory slots is overly constrictive. The amount of crap you have to pick up and find a use for combined with the number available weapons and tools means that almost half the game time is spent backtracking to the storage chest. This wouldn't that bad except...
• The enemies respawn way too damn fast. The sheer amount of backtracking and running around trying to find items for puzzles means crossing the same hallways multiple times, and the timer on enemy respawns are too fast, meaning that you run through available ammo or dodge the fuckers like its a speedrun while crisscrossing the levels looking for random bullshit. Yes there are flares introduced a little under a third of the way through the game that can perma-kill one enemy each, but there are so few of those (covering <10% of enemies) that it doesn't make much difference. If you burn through your ammo, you can potentially screw yourself during a couple of the boss encounters.

A fantastic aesthetic and well realized psychological horror story are bogged down by the tedious and obnoxious gameplay. Frankly, I wouldn't have even made it to the fake ending if I didn't cheat and give myself infinite flares. The combat and encounter design are enough of a drag that this would have been better had it been a more traditional adventure game.

I got the "Memory" ending, which left me feeling kinda shook. The realization at the end that Ariane and Elster were callously sent into deep space to slowly and painfully die in forgotten isolation, finding solace in each other, and then that one positive relationship which either of them has ever experienced ending in wasting darkness, wraps up the experience with some quality existential horror.

@borgmaster: the fake ending got me too, to the point that I had actually decided to stop playing for the night right after. So I selected quit game and left the room to go grab a snack, before coming back to my PC and the game being mid cutscene. Considering how much time was still left in the game, I'm kind of surprised it happened so early? And I definitely missed the point, story-wise.

Also, did you know you could change your radio station outside of the menu? It didn't help much in those fights with the enemies that require you to tune to identify them, but i found that it made those puzzles you mentioned a little bit less tedious.