These places are uncanny and follow a sort of dream logic, with constant flashes of other scenes and improbable sights implying something is wrong. ![]() Later she travels to an apartment complex where Ariane stayed as she went to a military academy. The first is a Eusan Nation “re-education camp” called S-23 Sierpinski, where an infection has seemingly turned the Replikas stationed there into fleshy monsters. To avoid going into exhaustive detail about the more ambiguous events that happen outside of this, the bulk of the game follows Elster as she searches for a woman named Alina Seo in various fluctuating locations. While the rest of the story’s events are hazy and potentially non-literal, this much seems to be “real.” It is heavily implied from notes you find later that Ariane eventually suffered greatly because of this, as radiation from the decaying ship and a lack of rations slowly killed her. However, Elster and Ariane defied this and lived together far past their prescribed time. ![]() According to the long-distance messages they received from mission command, at this point, the Replika unit was supposed to euthanize the Gestalt pilot to avoid a prolonged death, as Replikas were designed to last longer than the pilots. However, like all exploration missions conducted by the Nation, the expectation was that this would likely be a one-way trip, a fear confirmed by an absence of nearby habitable planets that would warrant a rescue. Over the course of this assignment, the two women fell in love, and between their duties of upkeeping the ship, Arianne would paint, and they would dance and watch movies together. The goal of their mission was to find planets or other celestial bodies which could be used by the Eusan Nation. The Eusan Nation is also made up of “Gestalts,” who are more or less synonymous with humans.Īt some point in the past, Elster was sent on a deep-space mission on the Penrose 512 exploration vessel with a white-haired Gestalt pilot named Ariane Yeong. While your character is referred to as Elster, this nickname technically refers to virtually all LSTR units who are used to carry out deep-space exploration missions. Replikas are cybernetically enhanced beings made with the “neural pathways” of a base host, meaning every unit of the same type shares memories of the person they’re derived from. You play as Elster, an LSTR Replika unit created to serve the dystopian Eusan Nation. Its story is told in a fragmentary style, with shifting settings, constant cutaways to mysterious imagery, and the heavy implication that only snippets of what you see are literal events. It’s the type of narrative that admittedly takes a bit of leg work to piece together, so I’ll offer my understanding of events before explaining what I believe its endings mean. Its four conclusions come together to achieve the kind of “thematic revelation” Truby spoke of, amplifying the story’s themes of fractured identity and the difficulty of accepting loss. Signalis, a recently released survival horror game from the two-person development outfit rose-engine, offers a compelling approach to the multiple-finale conundrum, with each one building on the rest in terms of plot and messaging. While there are titles that use different endings to drive at the same ideas from different perspectives, at its worst, this approach can make a work’s messaging feel tepid, unsatisfying, and contradictory. ![]() Even if one is meant to be interpreted as the “true” and “canonical” conclusion, this can lead to the other paths feeling like failure states or novelties more than a satisfying denouement. On its face, having numerous endings can dilute a story’s message by making it unclear which is “definitive,” a lack of clarity muddying any sense of thematic revelation. In short, the audience has a thematic revelation.” While plenty of videogames have conveyed this sort of thematic revelation, the climax of some games is complicated by something relatively unique to the medium: the inclusion of multiple endings. “The author highlights the thematic patterns one more time, and the audience realizes this representation of characters is also the way of the larger world. “Done well, the final scene gives you the ultimate funnel effect: that key word or line at the end sets off a huge explosion in the hearts and minds of the audience and resonates long after the story is over,” he wrote. In his book on screenwriting, The Anatomy of a Story, John Truby talks about the importance of a story’s conclusion. If you’re interested in the game, you should play it before reading. This article contains heavy spoilers for the endings of Signalis.
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