The Signifier Director's Cut

I purchased The Signifier not knowing a thing about it. I tend to dive into my games completely blind after only looking at a few screenshots. This had so much potential to be great but some quirks/oversights hold it back from making it feel like it was worth my time and money. First problem with the game is the complete lack of options. No key rebinding. No mouse sensitivity options. Barebones graphical options. No FoV, Not even a brightness slider. Not a great start, all of this should be standard these days. Second problem is the confusing structure to the puzzles. This is both a positive & a negative in a way. The general gist is you're able to go into the memories of a person that are rebuilt by an AI. There are many gaps in the memory however so buildings look a bit deformed (such as textures not loading in, objects missing, random geometry. Basically it looks like a game that's just starting to load everything in). Trying to piece together a mystery, warp through time, go between 2 different versions of these areas and find hidden pieces in this is TOUGH. It's a lot of Trial & Error and perspective stuff. Not a bad thing, but it can be frustrating. The last problem I have (which is huge) is how the endings are handled. You need to make choices and how you interact with other characters in the real world can dramatically shift your experience. However some of these choices don't seem major and can lead to a bad ending with no way to course correct. One choice I made gave me the games bad ending and from what I can tell, it was from one moment around an hour or two in. Over half my playthrough was apparently on rails for a bad ending and I never had a clue that was even a possibility. It really left a sour taste in my mouth. Overall, The Signifier really is a cool game. If you're into Sci-Fi, Decision Making and Puzzles then it's worth looking at. Just know about the shortcomings before diving in because for me, the issues were enough to ruin my experience.

It seems there's not a lot of people buying this game so I wrote this to provide some information. First of all, the technical stuff: I have a laptop with a nvidia 2070 and an 8th generation i7, the game ran above 100 fps the entire time. You can't rebind controls, this wasn't a problem for me on mouse and keyboard but I don't know how it works with a controller. The game looks decent, remember that it's indie, so I didn't expect AAA level graphics. There are a few characters you'll interact with, their animations are kinda stiff but I didn't find it to be a big deal. The voice acting is pretty good(for an indie game)! I played through the game multiple times and experienced one crash to desktop and later a bug that seemingly corrupted the latest autosave; thankfully the game keeps all the autosaves it makes from the start so I didn't lose too much progress. Speaking of gameplay, The Signifier is mostly a walking simulator with a few very easy puzzles that you'll solve while exploring memories. There will also be some dialogue choices to make on a few occasions: you should pay attention to those as there are multiple endings. I liked the game's UI. The story's themes are centered around AI and technological development in general, the consciousness and political struggle, which makes it interesting, but it feels somewhat rushed or underdeveloped; by the end I felt like the game didn't really provide any definitive answers about its central mistery(at least in the three endings I got, I'm not sure if there are more), and the relationships between its few characters should have been fleshed out more. I played for 12 hours while trying to get multiple endings, but my first run took between 4 and 6 hours; a fast player can probably complete the game in less time. I think the game's story could have benefited from a couple extra hours, but I don't regret buying it for 17€, since it's a fairly low price. I'm interested in seeing what the devs can do next.

In an alternate universe, heady narrative games get all the financing, all the marketing, all the resources they need to have their singular visions realized to maximum potential. In this universe, however, ambitious experimental projects such as these are relegated to lower-budgeted indie experiences, and it's inevitable that this comes at the cost of realization, to some extent. So it is with The Signifier, an eerie and relentlessly imaginative psychological thriller adventure game clearly assembled with loving care by a tiny team. The Signifier is engaging with some serious discourse, tackling questions about psychological epistemology and its subordination to capitalism, the lines between organic and artificial intelligence, and the ethics of tech and privacy in our postmodern age. At the same time, it's a story of personal traumas, relationships, obsessions, and the overlap between the three. For these qualities, it is worth playing for anyone willing to look beyond its technical shortcomings. For all the strength of its intellectual drama and phantasmagorical visual style, The Signifier suffers from graphical glitches and clipping that compromise the production value when they emerge. Gameplay is not always smooth, particularly in the mechanics that utilize sliders. In a few places, there are gaps in the narrative which, while not prohibitive in regards to understanding the story, make it seem like certain lines of the branching dialogues may have been removed a bit haphazardly. In one scene in particular, a major character had an entire conversation with me about a revelation that never actually occured, referencing something they claimed to have told me which they never did. Tome, however, it is easy to chalk these issue up to limited resources and a skeleton crew. The game's ambitions clearly exceed its budget, and if you're the type of gamer who can accept that then The Signifier will give you a unique, affecting experience that's well worth the price.

I want to do this short: The story has some Twists and makes sense from the beginning to the Surprising end. The setting is a relative realistic Sci fi city which could definately exist in around 10 or 15 years. I loved it. The graphics are really, really good most of the time, but it gives the parts in the reality a little Surrealistic style. especially the "Outside" is cool, with the .png pictures which change slightly with your point of view. The puzzles are not very hard, but still super fun, with the perspective, Raw data and the state changing stuff. none of them are boring. but yes, I experienced two bugs. one time I fell off the map in one sequence and it was a Gamebreaker. second time I managed to get out of bounds. I told the Devs and they should have fixed both by now. Overall one of the best Story games Ive played the last years. definately on the same level as Edith finch or Life is strange for me.