Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. Features

Check out this fantastic horror game before it leaves Xbox Game Pass next week

Carli Velocci
By

Grief can be unexplainable. I lost my grandfather a few years ago, and after his cremation, my family and I went back to his house and argued a bit about who would be sleeping in his bed. The bedroom was the same as before he passed, but there seemed to be a weird hole on the side of the bed where he used to sleep. It was like a shadow hovering just above the sheets. He was both there and not, and it was tough to put into words, even with others in the house.

SIGNALIS - Official Launch Trailer

This is the sensation that Signalis pulls off so well. The 2022 sci-fi horror game, developed by rose-engine, puts heavy and indescribable emotions into words. It uses themes from classic horror like The King in Yellow and H.P. Lovecraft to tell a wholly unique story about love, loss, totalitarianism, the power of memory, and, most importantly, the profound effects of loneliness and grief. All of this is wrapped in a familiar package, inspired by third-person PS1-era horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. While it’s currently free to play on Xbox Game Pass, it’s set to leave the service on October 31, so now is the best time to try it.

Recommended Videos

Cerebral horror

You play as Elster, a “Replika” android who wakes up from cryo-sleep on an abandoned shuttle with one thought: to find Ariane, your human partner. From the beginning of the game, it feels like something is missing. The isometric perspective adds to the feeling that something is always lurking just off-screen. And because you’re in abandoned locations with finicky electricity, the edges of your view are coated in shadow. Just out of sight might be a locked room or another Replika, most of which have degenerated into monsters. You’ll have to wander around all these facilities, uncovering the keys you need to move on and find the written logs and secrets that’ll unlock your memories.

A cutaway screen in Signalis, where the protagonist is silhouetted against a red background.
rose-engine via Steam

As Elster explores the world she’s woken up in, we learn about the fascist colonialist society that is now occupying the planet and the horrible tragedy that befell them. However, the story also looks into the connections we can make, both with the souls around us and the systems that (sometimes literally) build us. Despite Elster being an android, she managed to form a bond with the human Ariane. Through looking into her partner’s backstory, she learns that even in the middle of an authoritarian state, she managed to grow close with other people and form deep relationships with banned art.

Related

I don’t want to go too deeply into the story, although I don’t think I could’ve done it properly here anyway. Signalis is only around nine to 10 hours long if you just complete the story, but it packs so much into its relatively short runtime. This world feels expansive, despite the story taking place on a barren rock, and yet still familiar.

And that’s not even thinking about its inspirations, which Signals wears so proudly on its sleeve. Beyond its obvious roots in retro horror, complete with a restrictive inventory system, ridiculously dense puzzles, twitchy enemies, and a save menu straight out of Silent Hill, it also evokes some of the most important works from the gothic horror genre. Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow appears multiple times throughout the game, and it even begins with a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Festival. It can also trace its roots to Japanese sci-fi like Ghost in the Shell and two specific classic paintings: The Shore of Oblivion by Eugen Bracht and Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin.

It’s definitely a lot, but rose-engine can somehow blend all of these anachronistic influences for something new. Sure, there are a billion stories these days about trauma and grief, and Signalis still successfully uses the images you know to create a sense of profound emptiness that I haven’t experienced in a game since Silent Hill 2.

This might not be exactly what you’re looking for this Halloween. There are a lot of kinds of horror games to play this time of year, and spooky season tends to lean more towards the fun side of the genre than the existential, eldritch side, but Signalis is absolutely worth your time. It’s one of the most genuine representations of grief and a reminder that despite the horrors of the universe, there is room for connection.

Signalis is available now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It’s also available on Xbox Game Pass for PC, consoles, and cloud until October 31.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Carli Velocci
Carli Velocci
Contributor, Games
Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…
You don’t need an Xbox Series X to play Starfield. Here’s how
Key art for Starfield

Starfield is the highest-profile Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S game since Halo Infinite, but the game isn't locked to those two consoles. Thanks to cloud gaming and Microsoft's more open-ended mentality of making its games available on a wide variety of platforms, you don't have to own one of Microsoft's current-gen systems or have the Xbox app installed on your PC.
No, it's not on PS5 or Nintendo Switch, but if you want to play Starfield while it's at the center of the video game industry zeitgeist, here are some places where it's playable other than the Xbox Series X, Xbox Series X, and Xbox PC app.
Steam

The most obvious choice if you want to play Starfield elsewhere is to pick it up on Steam. While Microsoft does have a proprietary PC launcher of its own, Microsoft now consistently releases its own games through Valve's launcher. Bethesda joined Xbox Game Studios in 2021 and has a long history of making its games available on Steam as well, so it's not too surprising that Starfield is available on the platform.
Starfield already proving quite popular on the platform too, having peaked at 266,000 concurrent players, according to SteamDB at the time I'm writing this. If you're looking for a way to play Starfield natively on the hardware you own without using a Microsoft platform or service, this is your best option. It'll run on Steam Deck too, although that's not the only way to experience Starfield on the go.
Xbox Game Pass app on Android

Read more
If you love Starfield, try this sci-fi gem on Xbox Game Pass next
An astronaut stands on the moon in Starfield.

Starfield is one of the biggest games of 2023, both figuratively and literally. It’s Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years and a monumental landmark for Microsoft -- a company that’s struggled to deliver consistent first-party hits this console generation. On top of that, Starfield’s scope is absolutely massive. It’s a grand space-faring adventure filled with multiple planets, storylines, space battles, and gunfights.

Sometimes, Starfield feels overwhelming with all of its different mechanics and features. Even Bethesda’s Pete Hines said that the game doesn’t really start until you’re done with the main story. But who has that kind of time? If you’re looking for a sci-fi game that’s less demanding, or just want to take a break from Starfield while continuing to soak in space vibes, you need to try Opus: Echo of Starsong.
Love among the stars
First released in 2021, Opus: Echo of Starsong is a unique mix of a visual novel, puzzle adventure, and 2D side-scroller developed by Sigono. It takes place in a galaxy called Thousand Peaks and follows three characters: Jun, Eda, and Remi. Jun, now an old man, visits an unnamed asteroid and acts as the narrator as he recounts an adventure that he went on decades earlier.

Read more
The impending Xbox 360 Store closure makes me wary of Game Pass’ future
The Xbox logo.

I'm an avid Xbox Game Pass user, often trying almost every game that comes to the service and closely following the games coming to and leaving the service each month. Following some recent announcements by Microsoft, though, I've been thinking a lot more about something else about Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft's current digital-focused Xbox storefronts and ecosystem: what happens when it all goes away?
Microsoft announced last week that it will shut down the Xbox 360 Store in July 2024. After that day, it will be impossible to buy games, movies, or TV shows digitally on the Xbox 360 store; it's just like what happened with the 3DS and Wii U eShops earlier this year. That announcement also came not long after Microsoft revealed it would replace Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass Core in September. With these changes, Microsoft is stamping out any support or focus its giving to the Xbox 360's era as a platform. As someone who grew up mostly playing Xbox 360, seeing these things I grew up with go away is saddening. It's also making me think about the day this will eventually happen to Xbox Game Pass or the store on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Frankly, I'm not as concerned that Microsoft is going to do it anytime soon. Microsoft has given no indication that it plans on abandoning Xbox Game Pass. It's a really successful subscription service heavily integrated into all of its current platforms, there are titles confirmed to launch day one on it into 2024 and beyond, and Xbox initiatives like Play Anywhere and Smart Delivery ensure that at least some version of most Xbox games are available on other platforms. While I expect it to be the primary part of Microsoft's gaming strategy over the next decade, as someone who mainly played Xbox 360 growing up and is now seeing its storefront and subscription service go away, I'm now thinking about what the end of the Game Pass era will look like.
These recent actions have indicated that Microsoft will eventually be willing to do the same to the storefronts and subscription service we're currently using. Even after the backlash PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all faced from these announcements, Sony is the only one that has backtracked its plans to close down older digital storefronts, at least temporarily. Xbox Game Pass is the current hotness for Microsoft, but what happens come the day it isn't? A lot more games are digital-only or tied to a subscription this generation, and those are the games most at risk of being lost if a digital storefront shuts down.
What happens to the Xbox console versions of games like Pentiment or Immortality on Xbox once Xbox Game Pass and the current iteration of the Xbox Store are shuttered? Yes, they can be played on PC, but the Xbox console version will be lost forever. And right now, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any publicly shared plans to permanently preserve those experiences, nor has it done so for all of the Xbox 360 digital games going away. Game preservation is a significant problem facing the game industry, and Microsoft has just made a move showing that it's on the wrong side of that effort. 

Read more