This God Won’t Forgive You
Similar to Jeff Goldblum’s appearance at the Summer Game Fest Kickoff stream, the Tribeca Games Spotlight segment of the 2021 Summer Game Fest began with an unexpected face: legendary director Guillermo del Toro. Gamers may be most familiar with del Toro from his involvement with the ill-fated Silent Hills game. While that title was not brought back from the graveyard of canceled games, del Toro’s appearance was directly connected to a different horror game, the anime-style pixel art retro title Signalis. This game has actually been in production for a while now, but it’s still wonderful to see an update on developer rose-engine’s progress. And if this haunting trailer is anything to go by, the developers are doing just fine.
The new video shows off how the game runs at 4K 60fps–namely, entirely too good for its aesthetic. Like many other recent survival horror titles, Signalis is inspired by the horror games of the PS1 era, including the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. Its deliberately simple graphics don’t stop it from looking stunning in motion, however. Whether you’re looking at the sci-fi environments, the stylized character and monster designs, or the eerie text that keeps flashing across the screen, Signalis is a work of art. Spooky, spooky art.
The story of Signalis draws some inspiration from the likes of Blade Runner and Alien. It focuses on Elster, a technician Replika whose ship appears to have crashed on an ice planet–possibly because it has been overrun by shambling abominations. She’s only just awoken from cryosleep and neither she nor the player know what’s going on here. And if the constant appearances of pop-up screen filled with cryptic and often threatening text throughout the trailer are any implication, there’s something very wrong with her head. Whether it’s cybernetic implants, a memory of some buried trauma, or something worse, we don’t know yet, but since the game seems to touch on the theme of “compartmentalizing trauma,” we’re guessing that something terrible happened to Elster in the past. We’ll have to wait for more information to say anything concrete.
Signalis will be available for PC at a later date.
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