I was fascinated with Diablo II as a kid because of what looked like a grim reaper on the front. Convincing my parents to buy it for me, I eventually got around to playing it while being scared shitless. Later on, I also got a hold of the first Diablo CD, but never got around to playing it.

I come from a place where analysis and predictability are prized. Where anything that comes close to creative bursts of energy are controlled, honed into finely tuned cybernetics, tested over and over from every possible angle. Optimized, stripped of all of its humanity, barren and desolate in its mechanical prose; I come from software development.

“A Dream about Dreaming”

Mind Contamination

Signalis is like no other game I’ve played. And I do not mean that in a superficial sense; you can play a variety of games in the realm of survival horror with similar combat and puzzle mechanics (and I don’t have much interest in explaining these aspects). Although this game may be like several of those, including the predecessors it is inspired by that I’ve seen mentioned in other reviews, it is simultaneously like none of those and nothing else at all.

Henrick was mercilessly hooked on the stimulating lust of electrocution from the first time he stuck a paper clip in the electrical socket mounted to a desk during another bland day in middle school. Leading up to that point, he had been the type of person who was numb to life in almost all senses of the word. The days passed him by so slowly, so gloomily, so placid and dismal. Some that knew him - the few friends he associated with - eventually said that he had died before his mom had given birth to him. He was, perhaps, not exactly depressed, but there was rather an absence of any semblance of pleasure or feeling or love. Relationships, personal interests and hobbies, social banter: none of these things brought him the slightest shade of contentment, the slightest phenomenon of a feeling tone, and instead, he spent his days in a hazy dream, uncaring of his life or where it went.

Replicant, the progenitor of the Nier series.

The most pervasive theme throughout the course of this project is the following adage: there is always more to the story. There are things you are not seeing with your biased, limited perception, but things which nonetheless exist. All it takes is more time and a shift in perspective perhaps, and slowly, you begin to develop a fuller, more universal understanding. And with increasing perspectives that are not so self-referential and thus, self-limiting, you begin to develop compassion. You begin to develop empathy.