Survival indie horror game Signalis (2022) celebrates 10 years since German developers Yuri Stern and Barbara Whittmann (under the studio name rose-engine) started working on said game. Signalis draws from its horror game predecessors – namely, the Resident Evil series and Silent Hill – while evoking its own identity. rose-engine developed the game using Unity. The soundtrack is composed by 1000 Eyes and Cicada Sirens.
The game started as a student project while Stern and Whittmann were in university. The game started as a concept that mixed cosmic horror, dreams, isolation, and the Isle of the Dead painting by Arnold Böcklin, according to Stern. The graphics are inspired by older PS1 low-poly graphics, blending 2.5D top-down exploration mode and 3D first person POV.
Prototype of SIGNALIS as a side scroller while the developers were in university. (From Yuri Stern’s X post)
Originally a side-scrolling shooter due to time constraints, the good reception the game garnered during showcases allowed the developers to work more on the game. The summer after showcasing the sidescroller version, the developers were able to work the game into a top down horror game. Signalis would then go on to be officially published by Humble Games and PLAYISM on October 27th, 2022. It is available on PC through Steam, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. It was also briefly on Gamepass a year after the game’s official release.
As of 2024, the game has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam with 16,000 reviews. It has support in English, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Latin America), and French. It won the 2024 Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film and Games award, best Debut/Audio design for the German Game Awards 2023, was selected for Tribeca Festival 2021, and was nominated as Player’s Choice and Horror Game of the Year for the 2022 Horror Game Awards among other awards.