Nightmare Fuel / SIGNALIS

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

...and things have learned to walk which ought to crawl.

A prison from which the only escape is death.

Make no mistake: despite the retro PS1/2-style graphics, SIGNALIS delivers a visceral array of horrors as you make your way through the depths of Leng…and deeper still.

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• The cutscene that plays after you jump down into the hole in the Classroom on Floor B1:
  • Pneumatic, the music for the cutscene, kicks off with an ominous drone interspersed with pressurized hisses and a rhythmic, foreboding thump. It's at this point of the game where SIGNALIS dives headfirst into its horror aspects, and lets players know: something has truly gone wrong within the Sierpenski facility.
  • The cinematic opens with the hunched silhouette of a Replika walking by, with a weapon in hand. Intimidating, but relatively mild compared to everything so far. Then the next scene hits you with a close-up of a corrupted Eule, body and face drenched in blood, mindlessly hacking away at a heap of flesh. Whether the heap was Gestalt, Replika, or something else, no one knows. The cutscene ends shortly afterwards, but its enough to paint a picture of what kind of hell Elster has fallen into.
• According to notes found around the game world and hints of area detail, Replikas border on Artificial Human to the point of requiring food and their own bathroom, and can die from being stabbed and shot just like any human would, compared to the usual expected robotic durability for such entities. Then notes go at an eerie amount of length about how eating Replikas for food resources is actually incredibly toxic to Gestalts, thanks to the composition of their body being lethal enough to kill a person should such consumption occur. Which leaves the implication that the Nation of Eusan has had to note this down out of experience.
• The Mynah boss fight. After dropping down into the Surgery Room, you're treated to a cutscene showing a close-up of this new Replika's face. Another screen flashes briefly, showing a smattering of info about the robot...and then her face begins to bleed over and melt. Then the screen switches to the Mynah's visor closing, shutting off the deluge of Replika blood from her head, as she stands up and readies her mining laser…
  • The music for said fight does little to ease your nerves. Dull, metallic booms explode into deep, heavy warbles, perfectly bringing to mind the lumbering threat hunting you down in a cramped space.
    • In a way, the theme almost personifies the state of the Mynah. At one point, you can hear garbled, childlike vocalizations, as well as mechanical howls and low roars in the background. Coupled with the previously mentioned booms, the song seemingly captures the Mynah's perspective—stumbling about with heavy footsteps, trying desperately to maintain her sanity and bodily functions as she deals with this pesky intruder that just won't go away...
  • Throughout the course of the boss fight, the Mynah will periodically drop to her knees and open her visor, letting a torrent of blood and viscera gush out, spiderwebbing onto the floor. You can only wonder how the Mynah can even see through such a flood—there's more blood spilled than even her massive body seems capable of holding. Furthermore, these veins of blood hurt Elster if the player stands in them, suggesting that it's become incredibly toxic and corrosive, or possibly alive and hostile.
• The broken elevator. Elster is tossed down there by Adler, and her fall is broken by a pile of dead LSTR units, recognizable by their distinctive red chestpiece. Going down another floor reveals that this elevator shaft is completely clogged with those bodies, seemingly all the way down to the bottom. Elster doesn't seem to notice anything, and merely comments that the elevator is broken. With the later reveal of the time loop, it's implied that all of the dead bodies are Elsters who fell for Adler's trap and didn't survive the drop, piling up over countless loops until there were enough to break the fall of any further Elsters, which should give an idea of just how long this nightmare has been going on.
• The corrupted Replikas that Elster encounters on her journey bring more than their fair share of Body Horror:
  • Eules and Starlings retain the most of their pre-corruption anatomy, but that isn't saying much. Both are caked in blood and seemingly have their skulls exposed, hiding their deformity underneath bandages and cloth drapes.
  • Aras bring to mind the Slurpers from Silent Hill 3. Their arms are mutated into clubs, and their heads are elongated and swollen. Their bodies are hunched over and they posture their arms like a mantis's. They have the nasty habit of bursting out of the floor in seemingly empty rooms when least expected. Which raises the question—how many rooms are in fact interconnected by their tunnels, with their absence at a given point only due to happenstance?
  • Kolibris' heads are massive, bulbous growths that dwarf their body, twitching like something out of Jacob's Ladder. While harmless on their own, the rapid visual interference quickly exacerbates any combat situation where other enemies are bearing down on Elster.
  • Storchs became teetering, avian monsters, with a long, beaklike protrusion and missing arms. Unlike the other Replikas which shriek as they attack and die, Storchs emit a choked wheeze, and hiss when killed, hinting at just how much further changed they are compared to their brethren.
  • The thing encountered in Nowhere, a mass of meat and grabby hands inside a gibbet, walking on two pairs of Storch legs. It is encountered menacing Isolde Itou, and is so resistant to harm that Elster can only distract it until Isolde is able to load her high powered rifle and blow it away. There's no explanation for how this monster came to be, beyond the warped chaos of Nowhere, and no other example of its kind appears.
• At certain points, Elster will encounter rooms that are almost pitch-black, needing a flashlight to interact with anything. There is nothing stopping you from walking through said rooms, however, even if you don't have the flashlight. The problem is that enemies can see you perfectly fine—God help you if said room also contains vents for Aras. Elster will be left blindly stumbling about, either swarmed by Replikas or forced to retreat as quickly as she entered.
• Thermite flares can be used to make sure dead enemies stay that way. Alternatively, you can equip them as a melee item and use them on a living enemy, in which case you get to see it thrashing and screaming as the fire burns through its still-living body.
• The setting behind the game holds many existential horrors. Take for example:
  • Living in an oppressive surveillance state with cameras everywhere, violent interrogations and forced draft.
  • The concept of bioresonance and what it can do. For example being forced into war, where you might then be forced to face a FKLR unit in battle who will directly assault your mind, not exactly a fair fight. And in the case of Ariane, if taken at face value, all the damage her bioresonance did without even any ill will on her side. Her dying dream overwriting the memories of other people, essentially driving them insane.
  • Being stuck in a time loop that repeats again and again, reality breaking down a little more each time. Especially if you are an innocent worker who had no fault in the events that caused it.
• Once the "Groundhog Day" Loop is revealed, Elster herself is creepy. She's done this many, many times, and will potentially do them indefinitely more, slaughtering her way through the Replika corruption and distorted reality, and inevitably dying by the conclusion one way or another— and then repeating the process. Even when she remembers what she's doing, and what she has done, she refuses to stop doing it, something that Adler thinks is gradually destroying reality as they know it. With a player replaying the game and optimizing their runs, Elster's ascendance to a One-Woman Army is effectively repeating the loops with increasingly ruthless, pragmatic and efficient work that eventually cuts a bloody swathe through everything in her path.
  • The Suit Up of Destiny scene, after Elster drags her broken body into the Penrose. When she finds another dead LSTR, she starts ripping the corpse apart, starting with its arm, to get replacement parts and better armor for her damaged frame. During this gruesome act, text on screen reaffirms her determination to fulfill the promise, with creepy, grinding music giving it the air of a Madness Mantra.
    I made a promise. I'll do anything.
  • The letter involving LSTR Replika units doesn't help. It states that one should never befriend an Elster, show her war movies or play her music, due to the "Persona Degradation" it may cause for interfering with their tasks. Ariane didn't even bother opening the letter as she did all of these things exactly and then some, seemingly re-awakening the Past-Life Memories of a war veteran that is explicitly noted to get obsessive with the one they care about. The result is LSTR-512, a broken soldier who is so deeply rooted in co-dependency to justify her continued living that she'll leave a warpath through all obstructions and risk the end of reality to find Ariane.
  • The kicker is that "Persona Degradation" is actually the Nation of Eusan negatively referring to Replikas that become more of an individual. Which means Replikas are elaborately examined for every single mental weakness, defect, kindness and otherwise, and routinely manipulated to keep them in check as a Servant Race by curbing all the "negative influences" that might make them inefficient or resistant. LSTRs are known to grow attached and affect their work, so never let them grow attached. And their research into bioresonance infers that they plan to totally Mind Control all Replikas at once to remove the need for manipulations altogether once free will is cut from the equation.
• A small detail that is very easy to miss that really adds on the paranoia is that if you brighten the image, you can see that throughout most of the game there is a huge red eye covering nearly the whole screen, watching everything unfold. Or, it could be watching you. It only really in one of the endings which suggests it is Ariane who is watching.

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