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Signalis is Trapped in a Prison of Itself

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - The Book of the New Sun

Full spoilers for Signalis and Silent Hill 2 are as follows. CW: Spousal death, abuse, suicide, self-harm.

Last year's surprise horror darling Signalis is a game that begs to be read through the lens of its influences. It is difficult to find a piece on the game that does not, in some way, position its narrative on the game around the fact that it does not so much wear its influences on its sleeve, so much as its outfit is covered entirely by pins and badges of all things it holds dear.

While other works may invite argument on the degree of a respective influence, Signalis leaves no room for debate. It eases us into it at first, beginning with survival horror key-hunting gameplay that evokes Resident Evil, but these mechanics have become diffused, diluted, and become Norms, where specific evocation becomes difficult to detect. It's only at the end of its tutorial that Signalis makes itself clear: if you know the things it knows, if you love the things it loves, then there will be no escape from them.

You climb through the hole from Silent Hill 4: The Room into a room that evokes Henry Townshend's bedroom from that same game, whereupon the desk awaits Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow. Examining the book takes you into a cutscene that distantly evokes the sharp editing of Neon Genesis Evangelion, itself influenced strongly by works such as Gerry Anderson's UFO. And then, when you re-emerge from the cutscene, you find yourself staring at a mirror, unable to escape the weight of Silent Hill 2's opening shot bearing down upon you, as the segment of Chopin's Raindrop - Prelude that played in the memorable Halo 3 "Believe" trailer fades out.

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That last one may sound tongue in cheek or a misapprehension, and it very well could be, but the trick Signalis plays by not so much as evoking its influences but replicating them so constantly that barely a minute can pass without a direct reference to another work is that when there's something you can't quite place the direct line to, your mind draws the strings themselves. Signalis is already into so many of the things I am into. We both like Eva and Silent Hill. We both had a Lovecraft phase, evidently. Is it possible that it first heard Raindrop in an advertisement for Halo 3? By this question, all things within Signalis become supplicant to the question of influence, trapped within it. It is perhaps for this reason that so much writing on the game becomes about detangling and identifying these influences.

Even the basic language of interaction is steeped in influence and in one overriding influence in particular. While I referred to Resident Evil above as providing the foundation for the key-lock survival horror gameplay of Signalis, it is truly Silent Hill 2 that provides the framework to build atop that foundation. Like that game, it is broken up into smaller segments rather than the interconnected game-encompassing levels of Resident Evil, filled with doors to nowhere with broken locks that will never open. The combat might best be described as simply being Silent Hill 2, translated into an overhead angle, with near-identical audio design and enemies that very frequently feel like they walked straight over from that mist-covered town, most notably with the Mandarin and Nurse enemies. Despite the sci-fi setting, narratively we're still playing in Silent Hill 2's haunted wheelhouse: a message from a lost love calling to our character, a promise unkept, for now. Like James, Signalis' Elster is always descending through labyrinths both euclidean and otherwise, encountering her own Angela and Maria. This culminates in what might be the strangest decision of the game: to set the majority of its middle third inside a level from the original Silent Hill, namely, Nowhere.

It's here I began to struggle with Signalis. Its eagerness to reference was difficult for me to deal with at the beginning of the game, but only as a kind of annoyance, something that pushed me out of the game's wonderfully crafted atmosphere. I groaned when the first keycode of the game was "0451", I sighed when I saw the carpet from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining appear again and again. It feels frustrating, but ultimately it's something I could live with. The Silent Hill evocation, though? That I found difficult to swallow.

Silent Hill 2 is a special game, a kind of special that often makes it difficult to address or speak to. Its qualities are pored over relentlessly and sung with such enthusiasm as to become grating, and yet the countless eulogies to Silent Hill 2's self-evident beauty rarely reach the truth of it. It is, after all, the clear and direct inspiration for an entire series of unsatisfying horror games, namely the "Silent Hill" games, published by Konami and developed by a cadre of different developers from Europe and America. It's hardly controversial to call those games failures, and like Silent Hill 2, their failures are astonishingly well-documented. Every Silent Hill work after the original - including Cristophe Gans' not-entirely-irredeemable film - chases the shadow of Silent Hill 2 to its detriment, replicating wholesale ideas, images, and beats from that game, stripping them bare and rendering them devoid of meaning.

You've heard it a hundred times before: Pyramid Head is a representation of James Sunderland's thoughts of and capacity for psychosexual violence. And by bringing him back without James, these latter Silent Hill works stripped Pyramid Head of meaning, rendering him an aestheticized object of straightforward fannish devotion, replicated from a place of sincerity but without understanding. From his appearance in Silent Hill: Homecoming to becoming a playable character in Dead By Daylight, Pyramid Head has become an icon of Konami's persistent misunderstanding and mishandling of Silent Hill as a concept.

All of this is to say that much of Signalis feels very much the same.

That's a provocative statement, and I recognize that. To compare Signalis so directly to the western-developed Silent Hill sequels, some of the most popularly loathed horror games of the past two decades, is a move maybe destined to raise eyebrows. To be clear, Signalis is a better, more accomplished work in my estimation than Silent Hill Homecoming. But at the same time, Signalis begs to be read through its influences. If it did not wish this to be so, it would not make these influences so apparent, so impossible to ignore. Signalis is not a game that attempts to mask and blend its influences, it is a game that excoriates them and confronts you with them at every turn. It is a pastiche. To try to look past it would feel to me like an attempt to move past the intentions of the work, rather than fully engage with them. Images have meanings, defined in part by their contexts, and if Signalis wishes to lift imagery from Silent Hill 2 and other works, then it, by necessity, carries the meanings with them, whether it intends to or not.

Hewing so close to the imagery and ideas of a game about the psychosexual violent impulses of a man who killed his wife - however you wish to interpret James' motivations, the fact is that he did kill Mary - produces some odd effects, particularly in a game about lesbian robots. It wisely avoids including an overtly masculine sexually threatening figure like the Red Pyramid in its cast but there remain traces of that impulse dancing around the edges in figures like the Storch enemy and Adler, who is both the only male character in the game and also the closest thing it has to a malevolent antagonist. And yet, it's impossible to shake the feeling for me that there does seem something odd about borrowing all this in a game largely uninterested in masculinity, of placing these same rhythms of violence against twisted representations of the female form - some explicitly sexualized - in the hands of someone who does not have the kind of commentary James Sunderland brought to the act.

Which is not that they're a completely terrible fit in and of themselves. Signalis is, in the end, at least partially, a game about killing your wife.

I say "killing" rather than "murdering", which is how I would describe James Sunderland's act, because crucially, unlike Mary, Ariane (player character Elster's partner) is outright and openly suicidal. Mary's feelings on her illness and her impending death in Silent Hill 2 are complicated, often contradictory, in an intensely human way, but there's never a suggestion that Mary wanted James to kill her, and in one ending, she's actively furious that he did so. In Signalis, this ambiguity is strip-mined out of the act: Ariane wants to die and asks Elster to kill her. In fact, the final act reveals that the entire game is likely an endless loop of Elster making her way through Ariane's nightmares, given flesh and form by reality-bending powers, down to the bottom of the labyrinth to try to kill her, over and over again, sometimes making it, sometimes not. While I'd hardly claim that the suicidal impulse is ever a simple one, and certainly there's a lot to read into the substance of Ariane's nightmares, Elster's goal is not mired in the same ambiguity, the same torrent of mixed emotions, that James' act is. She is motivated single-mindedly by her love for Ariane, and her desire to fulfill the last wish of the woman she loves.

This sits...uncomfortably with the tattered remains of Silent Hill 2's sexual violence that dangle off Signalis' skin grafts. Framing the killing of Ariane in such terms colors the sublimated act of wife-killing you spend the entire game doing, using it to underscore Elster's undying determination and love rather than the difficult and upsetting inner world of James that his monsters demonstrated. There are elements of complexity you can read into their relationship - the argument that Ariane putting the burden of her suicide onto Elster is an extraordinary act of abuse, or the fact that as per the game's world, Elster is not Ariane's equal and is in fact closer to her slave, a piece of property that she owns - but overwhelmingly this is not the reading I have seen made of their relationship. Even the latter is seemingly a major part of the appeal to their relationship to at least one fan I spoke to, a depiction of gentle BDSM or pet-play dynamics that they found affecting. People care about Elster and Ariane in a way they just don't for James and Mary.

This is perhaps best demonstrated in how the game goes about its goal to replicate the multiple endings of Silent Hill 2, but with significantly less impact. The two endings you get based on your performance through the game feel like echoes of the ending you're most likely to get, where Elster gets close to her goal but ultimately either fails or turns away. They are defined, in large part, by the "primary" ending. Again, like Silent Hill 2, there is another secret ending that you can get on New Game+, where you can perform a ritual that evokes the calling of the player character's wife back from death. Neither Silent Hill 2 nor Signalis explicitly depicts this - in Silent Hill 2 it is framed as a doomed, fool's errand, the ultimate failure of James' inability to accept what happened, while Signalis shows the ritual and then a short scene of Elster and Ariane dancing together in the wreckage of the ship that was their home.

When I watched this ending, I read it much the same way that I read the corresponding Rebirth ending in Silent Hill 2: this was a deeply sad, futile attempt by Elster to reclaim something she can never really get back, a deep dive into esoterica out of a futile desperation that feels so concretely hollow. I was surprised, then, to find that so many people online did not feel this way about the scene. In most of what I read about it, I found that people read it as the closest thing to a happy ending the game has to offer, a moment of the two together. Similarly, most fan art of the game that I've seen depicts Elster and Ariane as a happy couple, holding hands, reading together, railing each other...it speaks to the earnestness by which the game depicts Elster's love that people invest in it wholeheartedly, in a way I've never really seen with James and Maria, a relationship too difficult and complicated and fraught to easily romanticize.

I don't know if it's a reading I can easily see for myself. Part of this is personal hangups - I have never sat well with works that romanticize literal owner/property romantic relationships, it's just a personal trigger point - but I can't deny that part of it is that I am also trapped in the same cage of influence that Signalis has entombed itself in. My knowledge of, affection for, and reading of Silent Hill 2 in the context of Signalis' constant evocation of it and other influences is as a fog that comes down around me, that renders me incapable of seeing through these influences. Even my reading of Silent Hill 2 is just that - a reading, one that prevents me from seeing it in terms of one who might disagree strongly with the things I have asserted about it. Can I break free, or will I never be able to hear Chopin's Raindrop without thinking of the Master Chief?

At the bottom of the spiral, this is when the game finally clicked for me. If the world of the game is the product of the inner world of Ariane, brought to life by her reality-warping powers, and filled with both her memories and the art and music she was obsessed with, would it too not be filled with her influences? Would we be able to escape the symbols that have made us in a world made of ourselves? Or would they haunt us, creep into every thought, tainting every dream, screaming that we are nothing but them?

Signalis is a game about its influences, or rather, what it means to be influenced by them. It's about what it means to have an image, a note, a word stuck in your head so deep that you cannot pull it out, a painting that colors everything you see in those same tones, a book that consumes your thoughts entirely and demands you read its words in every book that you see after it, about the limitations and boundaries our influences place upon us. About the prison that we make for ourselves out of them, in our own hearts our own minds, preventing us from seeing anything apart from their terms, doomed to the same looping events, over and over, unable to imagine anything new. The horror of things becoming norms that wrap around us and pull us tight. No moving on, no breaking free. Just this, just us. Forever, and ever, and ever.

I don't love Signalis, and I don't feel able to use this reading to absolve it of its failings. Regardless of how intentional it might be, I still find its eagerness to aestheticize its imagery immature and unsatisfying, creating some moments that I found either embarrassing - the conflation of Russian, East German, and Chinese iconography into a tuneless morass of red scare imagery is more than a little eye-rolling - or outright offensive - the game's shallow use of explicit self-harm imagery. I think the technical competence on display is nothing short of remarkable, and I think this team has a great game in them. I just don't think this is it.

And yet, I can't deny that I find it affecting. I can't deny that it worked on me. I can't deny that I saw myself in it.

Because I too, am trapped in a prison of myself.

Aren't we all?

#interesting take #firmly disagree with most of it #especially the 'red scare' take #but well written and worth considering

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