When I woke up, I felt the smell of rust in my mouth.
It’s not a metaphor. At the beginning of the game, my character — the bionic agent Elster — opened his eyes after the broken escape, and his first sigh was a cold smell of metal fish. This smell runs through the whole game, as a rusty nail taken at the root of the tongue, reminding me that this body is borrowed, this memory is rented and the person I am looking for may only be an illusion of stubbornness in the decline of the signal.
The world is as the illustrations of scientific fiction magazines after the 1990s. The low polygonal corridor extends infinitely, the warning slogan on the wall is blurred and the point of file is a voluminous outdated terminal, making a summary of reading and writing. I only have six storage compartments. One arm occupies two spaces, the ammunition occupies a room and a medicine bag occupies a room. The remaining space is for keys, documents and foreign parts that are not known for being used. Today’s choice is a sacrifice: with more bullets, you have to leave the ribbon that can hide the password. Survival has become an anxious cycle to constantly fill and empty your bags here.
But the true enemy is not a monster, but a “signal”. A voice would suddenly came from the radio, intermittently, calling me the Elster and saying that it was not “the lower floor, where there are six lights”. I rushed there and it had only one empty corridor and fluorescent tubes blinking. After the second time, the signal changed, saying that it was “no final of the circular staircase”. When I arrived, the style of the stairs had changed. These voices are warm and familiar, but the direction of the orientation contradicts itself, as the own memory is deliberately lost. Started asking me if you were looking for her or meaning that an action of “looking for her” giving me?
What suffocates me are these “senses of déjà vu”. I opened a door that I had never seen before, I knew that the third closet was not locked; before the new one broke his head, my fingers entered a sequence of numbers in my brain. The game doesn’t have an explanation, just leave these “memories” the flashback is my only navigation. I’m still, as a blind following the marks on the wall, but who can guarantee that these marks are not recorded by me in despair in the last cycle? When I finally called for the Elster factory register in a terminal and I saw that the number of memory initializations was “7”, the whole universe seemed to be quiet for a second. It’s not my first time here. Can’t be the last time for me.
The monsters are very quiet. They don’t wrinkle, but they drag their deformed bodies and wander slowly and persistently by the runner. There is no pleasure in killing them, only a profound fatigue. Ammunition is always scarce. Learn to hide me, hide me and deviate to avoid fights. Once, I was arrested in a dead end without exit. The lantern was without energy, and the black silhouette of the monster slowly approached. Before the darkness was absolute, I opened the playback button of the recorder — it was a melody that I had accidentally recorded before, that it seemed to have been sung by her. The monster stopped moving. He listens in the dark. These seconds after, he turned slowly and disappeared into the depths of the corridor. At that moment, I understood that we were stuck in different frequencies, looking for the echo of the same melody.
The climax of the game happens in a cycle of dreams. I woke up in a tidy apartment. She was making coffee after cooking and the sun was bomb. This is the most cruel present of the system — giving me a perfect and warm false final. I can choose to stay. But the coffee doesn’t taste right. A light from the sun is very uniform, as a slippery super expose. I walked to the door of the apartment (should not exist) and put my hand at the door. After cooking, she implored: “Don’t open. Isn’t it good to stay here?”
I opened the door. From the side of the forums from the door there was a cabin of the cold escape, and the smell of rust ran the turn to the nasal cavity. Returned to the starting point, or another starting point. Clearing customs is not a victory, but choosing to continue to believe a person who may not exist, and to continue to be a stubborn recipient in the sign of the criminal.
After it was dark, I sat in the darkness. The sound of the computer fan sounds like a spaceship engine. Suddenly, I remembered the cat I had lost many years ago. I looked for him for several days and called his name repeatedly times in the community late at night. Finally, I gave up. But until today, in some similar nights, when I hear a similar sound, you will unconsciously catch my breath and hear.
SIGNALIS don’t give me a great story about love or loyalty. This gives me an experience of the state of “loss of frequency”. Isn’t each of us a receiver with bad signal? After disorder from memory, try to distinguish these weak signs of the past and the loved ones. We draw a map of the life of agreement with these intermittent instructions and pretend to believe that it takes an exact end.
Perhaps, to this evidence of the existence, we know that the signal can be empty, but we still refuse to take the headphones from the ear. No noise electrostatic unlimited, we are still concentrated, year after year, waiting for the next call that may be only one illusion.
