The World's best Cosmic Horror game.

when it comes to horror games I tend to become a bit jaded when I was younger horror came in the form of big screams and sudden pop-ups something we refer to now as jump scares but back then I found them so terrifying even a Gmod map was enough to put the fear of God in Me Once once that scare subsides it's over it's a fade to the main menu and you try again to survive against whatever was chasing you or trying to find you jump scares are still effective so yes they do still scare me [ __ ] to split oh [ __ ] oh the market is so saturated with these kinds of games that there's really no need to recommend them people will be able to pick their poison based on what they might find interesting so when I got older the thrill of jump scares mostly left and I was wondering what horror really had left for me that's when I found junjiito renowned horror manga artist and short form Storyteller I'm not too familiar with the majority of his work but my mom thought it was a great idea to give a 15-year-old the full collection of Uzumaki a story about a town undergoing a supernatural phenomenon that twist people's minds to become obsessed with spirals that synopsis doesn't sound great and it really doesn't do it justice but their Madness and their Obsession drove many people to the point of suicide disfigurement and eventually an unbreakable curse that swallows the entire town leaving the protagonist of the story to become part of the never ending spir spiral the idea of the horror behind Uzumaki was that it was unexplainable but had visible patterns that you thought you could eventually escape the unfortunate truth of that is that with a Perpetual spiral there was never a beginning to it and that never will be an end this concept is known as Cosmic horror originally derived from HP Lovecraft from works such as the call of cthulu and the shadow over insouth both of them mentioning the old ones as an unexplained collection of entities that are unknowable but immeasurable in power often described as being able to end the world on a whim but never malevolently as humans we are at the top of the food chain due to our intelligence but love craft sought to make that Comfort we feel at the top be our downfall and chose to make something that not only is above us but so far above we have little to no chance to fight this off our only hope being that we have to accept the doomed world and inevitability of death discovering any real evidence of any of this going on is intentionally made to seem like mad ramblings something so far away from the norm and what we consider truth that we pass it off as insanity or fictitious a famous quote from HP Lovecraft is the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown to an old one we're merely flies or bacteria too small to notice or care for easy enough to dispatch or get rid of but never truly worth the effort or even worth considering the idea of cosmic horror is never about the protagonist winning or surviving but they're merely a tool for the author to capture the world around them before they see their own fate and that is where signal comes in a survival horror game developed by Rose engine and published by Humble games and playism I'm going to be honest I'd never heard of these Studios before I'd even played signal and I don't expect you to either it plays as a top down shooter with puzzle elements and plays very similar to like mainstream horror franchises like Silent Hill and Resident Evil lots of room searching lots of enemies that get back up and moving through the area as you collect more stuff and solve more puzzles the first thing you might notice about the game is its art style it's got a blend of both late '90s PlayStation 1 and pixel art anime that depicts a totalitarian dystopian future the game starts off with a command [Music] [Music] the first thing you might notice is you are a robot a replica to be exact designated LST or land survey ship technician replica we just call them ster for short it also means Magpie in German uh thanks signal Wiki replicas are biomechanical humanoids given unit designations based upon their specific role you are lifted up out of a pod inside the ship and Boot It Up to explore your surroundings finding out you are part of something called the Penrose program the Penrose program is designed to send spaceships out into the far reaches of space to find suitable worlds for inhabitants or resources for the usan regime and it looks like you've crash landed on one the crew usually consists of a gal pilot and an ster Unit A gal meaning any member of the uson regime that isn't a replica if you walk around the ship for a bit we you end up finding another pot and presumably it's for another member of the crew its glass is seemingly opaque and attempting to open it will give us this closeup firstperson angle over the controls for the pot however right now you probably don't know the code for this so now it's time for my new favorite verb introducing backtracking exploring combining and solving or Becks for short as you do some Becks around the ship we treated to another firstperson section where you can see a space suit storage where one is seemingly missing well thanks for waking me up before you left I guess you we can see we need a key card to access the suit so what time is it it's be's time we find a control panel in a firstperson section and a monitor that tells us that the gestal pilot aong has no signal on board the ship we also find some cellot tape this will come in handy later assuming that aong is the other gal member of the ship and the space suit is missing we can kind of put the pieces together that they're not on the ship and they left without us the next first person section takes us into the cockpit interacting with various parts of the ship we now know that Not only was there an electrical failure but the ship probably won't ever fly again we are stranded here we find a photo attached to the scanner and pick it up where we're introduced to a pretty Niche but neat design choice to inspect the photo in our menu system not only do we learn that the girl's name is Arian young but we also find a 3X3 grid with red squares marked out the combination to the other pot on the ship for [Music] [Music] combining the cell tape and the snap key card we get a full key card allowing us to get our space suit and hight tail it after our gestal pilot [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] moving forward we see a perfectly Square monolith humming as we get closer and closer to it once we pass through we're treated to something any normal person would usually stay very very clear from a perfectly circular blood red hole in the ground with steps descending into it definitely an oosha violation I'm I'm just putting it out there once we get down we find a tunnel inside the hole having nowhere else to go we crawl through and of course the game couldn't just t Port you to the other side of the hall no no no no that's too easy this is another first person section you are brought face to face and I really hope you don't have claustrophobia getting closer you're able to see an office space a very small room and once inside you can begin exploring your surroundings first there's a computer screen but it's seemingly blank there are photographs of an island and a coastline the flag of the Glorious usan regim and when we turn around no tunn yeah there's no way of going back now in the corner we see a safe pad locked three times over with chain safe door another lock door with a ominous red glow behind it and lastly a Tome laying on the desk named The King in Yellow for the uninitiated the King in Yellow is a collection of short stories made by Robert W Chambers published in 1895 the first four of which are Loosely connected Ed by a mysterious and malevolent Gothic entity known only as the King in Yellow the latter stories however tail off from the Supernatural and maab tones towards romantic fiction which will make a lot more sense later picking up the book starts a radio transmission and I'm just going to let this play out [Music] [Music] fear 8 9 8 left [Music] [Music] d right and [Music] so what are you waiting for this is the part of the video where I tell you go byy the game go play the game and then come back to these reviews my original intention was for me to go through all of these events of signal and then try to piece it together throughout the entire video however as the project just went on and on it got a little bit too complicated so I've decided to make it more of an episodic format and if you want to see more of that please let me know in the comment section below with this new format I'll be able to go more in depth than what I originally planned to do however if you do decide to go down this rabbit hole with me just be aware that there are going to be spoilers so if you are at all interested in this game I highly recommend picking it up it sits at around 20 on Steam which is really really good and and if you do want to get it from a key site there's usually cheaper copies out and about somewhere however I fully believe that you should support the developers on this one because they are extremely talented people I did buy the game unfortunately not a physical copy because that would have been awesome I can't get into why having a physical addition of the game would make it any different but without revealing a little bit of a spoiler for the story going forward as much as I'd love to but once again if you do want to see any more signal content on this channel please let me know in the comment section below and share it you know do whatever you want to do cuz I do have a lot planned for this but I really respect that you got to this portion of the video and thank you so much for supporting me so for those of you watching in a playlist Now's the Time for episode 2

Channel: EggsKenedict

Views: 9,574

Keywords: Signalis, Horror, Horror Game, Cosmic Horror, EggsKenedict, Video essay, Uzumaki, Junji Ito, twitch, Eggs Kenedict, Scary, Horror game essay, Signalis review

Id: 0MCAjWAsij8

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2024