When it comes to telling any story, world-building is essential. It’s how writers immerse and emotionally attach their audience to the narrative, with the hope of leaving you impacted after finishing it. As you consume media, the author is constantly trying to leave something behind with you: a lasting impression, a lingering thought, a claim, an argument, anything. By the end of my play-through of Signalis, the survival horror video game that won the Outstanding Video Game GLAAD Media Award in 2023, I felt emotionally tethered to the protagonists Elster and Ariane, and their story. The impact it left on me was monumental, and the culprit was the exceptionally immersive narrative of the game.
The World of Signalis
A large reason why I became attached to the narrative was because of the game’s expansive world-building, and how the game chose to deliver it. The world of Signalis, set in a solar system largely controlled by a totalitarian faction called the Eusan Nation, is dense with the lore of fictional politics and social nuances that help the player understand what it’s like to live there; war propaganda posters litter the walls of the S-23 Sierpinski Mining Facility, and many items in the map are designed to help the player infer strict governmental control, such as the mention of banned books, banned access to radios, and the existence of facilities meant to re-educate societal deviants. We learn that citizens are forced into compulsory military service, sent on suicide missions into space, and made to work in inhumane working conditions. We’re also exposed to the folklore of the world, like how the people of the Eusan Nation believe that a large storm eye (similar to our own Jupiter’s Red Eye) on one of the system’s planets is seen as a bleak symbol of the Nation’s strict surveillance. The game is constantly trying to tell us diegetically that the protagonists of the game, Elster and Ariane, exist in a society where citizens live with no autonomy.
Elster and Ariane
According to the societal standards of the Eusan Nation, the protagonists of Signalis, Elster and Ariane, were both considered social rejects. Starting with Ariane, her upbringing on the planet Rotfront was suffocated by censorship; the banned books we see in the game belong to her, a secret kept from Eusan’s strict surveillance only because she grew up on an isolated radio post. At the radio post, she developed taboo interests, such as art and literature. By the time she moved into a more populated city, she was outcasted and bullied by her peers and instructors at school.
As for Elster, I speculate that she was also deviant from the typical Eusan social model, because as we see in many reports throughout the game, the resurgence of her Gestalt memories was seen as a defect to her program. As she befriended Ariane on the Penrose ship, I can only imagine that the resurgence of other Gestalt traits, such as her love for Ariane, were also traits she was programmed to not feel, and possibly feel shame for.
And for Elster and Ariane as a canonical couple, I also want to speculate that perhaps they felt taboo just for being together? Although they were confined to the Penrose alone with one another, shame isn’t something that just goes away after a lifetime of it being drilled into you, and I can’t help but wonder if Ariane felt it as she loved Elster, a Replika (or, robot), as a Gestalt (human).
Even lightyears away from the Eusan solar system, could Ariane’s personhood still have been under the dictation of the Nation’s societal expectations? The answer is, possibly!
Personal Speculations on the Subtext of Signalis
What sparked my initial interest in this topic was a certain phrase that shows up frequently during the game’s memory cutscenes, which we later find out are projections of Ariane’s subconscious: “This space intentionally left blank”.
In typical fever dream fashion, the text flashes across the screen several times. While I could definitely excuse these instances as filler frames (and, if I’m being completely honest, they probably are), considering their frequency to be intentional adds much more depth to Ariane as a character. It could imply that the Eusan Nation’s control is so deeply engraved into Ariane’s mind that she subconsciously redacted certain experiences from her memory because they were taboo. I find it interesting how Ariane is entirely human, yet censorship was programmed into her just like any of the robots we see in the game.
One central theme of the game is that memories shape one’s identity. Several characters in the game spiral into madness when abruptly receiving memories that don’t belong to them, because they start to lose their sense of self. A character named Falke, a victim of this, described this phenomenon in the words, “I don’t know where I end and she begins”.
With that said, how much of Ariane’s memories and identity have been censored by her own subconscious, solely because her world didn’t accept her? What did she censor? What memories do we never get to see from her, and what memories does she keep herself from seeing?
So Why Does This Matter?
Signalis demonstrates the dangers of suppressing one’s personhood, and how once it’s taught, it never truly goes away. Ariane’s character demonstrates this because even millions of miles away from her home, the deepest parts of her own subconscious continues to censor her own memories, just as her oppressive society taught her to.
While this theory on the overarching theme of Signalis is just a wild reach at the end of the day, the fact that the video game can support endless discourse on its meaning is only proof that the game is brilliantly written. It’s an absolute masterclass in world-building and constructing fleshed out characters to live in it, and for that, I think it truly deserves all of the praise and awards it receives.
