The year was 1998, and I was sitting in my living room in the late evening, with a PlayStation controller in my small hands. I had just fired up this new-ish game all my classmates were talking about: Resident Evil 2. You must play it at night, they said. Sure, why not. I remember getting to the police station, barely. Then a zombie unexpectedly crawled out in a hallway, giving me a jump scare I still remember today. I put my controller down, turned the game off, and never played again.

To be fair, I was 11 at the time, so perhaps Resident Evil 2 wasn’t the best choice of game. (That’s what peer pressure does!) But I never fared too well with horror games. Then, technology evolved. Graphics and controls got more sophisticated, but something got lost in the process. I didn’t have any issues with Resident Evil 5. And I didn’t bat an eye playing through Until Dawn. I thought I could handle any horror game with smug indifference. Signalis proved me wrong.

Developed by German studio rose-engine, Signalis is a 2022 survival horror game, currently available in the PlayStation Plus August lineup. The game is designed to mimic the graphics and gameplay of PSX games, especially the early Resident Evil and Silent Hill titles. It’s a top-down shooter where players have to navigate claustrophobic environments, solving puzzles and avoiding or killing zombie-like enemies while trying to make sense of a complex story rooted in the concepts of memory, identity, and isolation.

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