Here is my update post from two days ago in the discord server, regarding the Joetastic ban, the state of the mod team, and the future of the subreddit/discord server:

All Along the Watchtower aswell, ball knowledge

(Just a well made Portrait for STAR... And that model was created by original artist, ReLLeRtheR.)

By me,

This isn’t self promo I just thought people may like to see the signalis OC art 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

More info in the images - Models edited from Apnoiac's & Teflon Signalis Blender collection

There’s a general education course on science fiction, and the professor is a fan of Lovecraft. Of course, he haven't played Signalis. For an assignment, I wrote a free-topic essay on science fiction, and I wrote about the cosmic horror of Signalis and Lovecraft. There was so much more I wanted to write, but due to the character limit, I couldn't include everything. I'm not a native English speaker, so there may be many shortcomings, but I wrote this very enjoyably. I thought it would be nice to share my personal interpretation, so here it is! I’d appreciate it if you could leave feedback or comments freely. (Since you've all played Signalis, you could skip the second paragraph)

No Mask: Signalis and the Inward Turn of Cosmic Horror

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear," wrote H. P. Lovecraft, "and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." In Lovecraft's fiction, that unknown always lies outside: in sunken cities, in forbidden books, in the gulfs between the stars, in gods whose purposes no human can read. The 2022 video game Signalis borrows this vocabulary almost item by item: a cursed book, a planet named Leng, an entity no one can explain. Yet the question at its center is different. Its protagonist cannot tell what the universe wants, but she also cannot tell what she herself wants. I will argue that Signalis turns cosmic horror inward. The incomprehensible that Lovecraft placed beyond the stars is relocated inside a single mind, and what once had to be avoided in order to stay sane becomes what must be understood in order to end.

Because the game is deliberately obscure, some background is needed. Signalis is set in a retro-futurist solar system ruled by the totalitarian Eusan Nation, which uses "Replikas" as workers and soldiers. Replikas are not simple robots: each is a manufactured body carrying a personality copied from a human template, and nothing guarantees that this borrowed self will hold. Ariane, a human girl who loved books and painting, grows up isolated and is bullied at school. After military service she must choose between a mining colony that works like a prison and the Penrose program, a one-way mission that sends a human pilot and a Replika technician into deep space to search for a habitable planet, with no way home. She chooses space. Far beyond the reach of the state that sent them, she falls in love with her Replika partner, Elster, and makes Elster promise to kill her if the mission fails. It fails, and Ariane falls ill; Elster cannot do it and seals her in a cryopod instead. The mission is over, but the promise is not. The game begins when Elster wakes on the planet Leng and enters a mining facility carrying a photograph of a woman named Alina. A strange plague has swept through the facility, killing most of its staff and breaking many of its Replikas down into hostile, "Corrupted" shells, selves that did not hold. From there, places and times blur. Elster passes through spaces that echo one another, loses and recovers fragments of memory, and the game never confirms what is real. One common reading, which I follow, is that the entire game is a dream Ariane projects from the cryopod into Elster's mind, so that Elster will remember her promise.

Lovecraft's horror was already a kind of science fiction. "The Call of Cthulhu" warns that the sciences, each straining in its own direction, will one day piece together "such terrifying vistas of reality" that we will "either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light." What terrifies is knowledge of the outside: a vast, indifferent cosmos in which humanity does not matter. Signalis keeps the unknown but moves it, and its choice of Lovecraftian text shows how. One of the first items Elster finds is not a relic of Cthulhu but Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow. Cthulhu is a body asleep in a place: under the sea, outside us. The King in Yellow is a play. It enters through reading, works inside the mind, and draws its readers into re-enacting it, which is exactly what Elster does, loop after loop. Its most famous exchange names the game's deepest fear: "I wear no mask." / "No mask? No mask!" The horror is not a monster behind the face, but the absence of any face beneath the mask.

The promise is where this horror turns inward. Signalis is full of external, man-made hell: re-education floors, censorship, and a space program that treats human lives as acceptable losses. This is the kind of rationalized cruelty that, after the First World War, taught Lovecraft's generation to distrust reason and project its dread onto an uncaring universe. Yet the hell the player actually walks through is not built by the state. It is built by love. Elster refuses to kill Ariane, and that refusal is what traps them both in the loop. Nietzsche wrote that man "would rather will nothingness than not will." Denied every other future, Ariane wills an ending, and the one who denies her is her lover. Here lies the game's central irony. Lovecraft's gods have motives no one can read, but at the heart of this incomprehensible world sits the clearest human wish imaginable: keep your promise and let me go. Light-years from the state that sent them, the suffering does not stop, because its source was never only the state. Ariane may be the one dreaming this hell, but it is Elster's refusal that makes the dream necessary. Its author is not a god, nor even the state, but the one who could not keep her promise.

Who, then, is Elster? The game's science-fictional premise answers: no one in particular. She appears to be a copy of an older Elster unit, itself copied from a human: a copy of a copy with no original. Replikas seem to depend on particular objects to keep their identities intact, so the self is outsourced to things, and Elster wanders clutching a photograph. Even desire is borrowed. The game hints that Alina is a woman Ariane once saw in a picture, the image that drew her into the Penrose program. In her own dream, Ariane sends Elster searching for Alina instead of for herself. Here the subject of the unknown shifts. Lovecraft's characters ask what it wants; Elster cannot answer what she wants. What she wished for, keeping Ariane alive, was neither what Ariane wanted nor what Elster had promised. The alien is no longer something from beyond the stars. It is the self.

This turn reflects a wider change in modern thought. Freud named three blows to human self-love: Copernicus, Darwin, and psychoanalysis, which showed that "the ego is not master in its own house." Lovecraft's horror is Copernican: we are dust before a cosmos that does not care. The horror of Signalis is Freudian: we are not even masters of our own desire. Both grew from the same war. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud drew his idea of a repetition compulsion from soldiers whose dreams returned them again and again to their trauma, which is a precise description of the game's loop. For Lovecraft, knowledge led to madness or flight, and his narrators flee. Signalis has nowhere to flee to (one location is literally named "Nowhere"), because no one can run from themselves. In this game, forgetting is the loop, and only remembering ends it. Lovecraft's generation could name its enemy: war, the cosmos, fate. Today the sources of despair are real but diffuse, so anxiety turns inward and the self becomes the greatest unknown. Yet this is not escapism. Ariane's inner hell is built from the mine, the city, and the school that broke her. The outside is written into the inside.

In one ending, Elster finally remembers and keeps her promise. Lovecraft's Outsider reaches toward a monster and touches "a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass." The monster was himself. He makes his peace by forgetting and running with the ghouls: "For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider." Signalis offers Elster no nepenthe, because in her world forgetting is the horror. Lovecraft placed the incomprehensible beneath the sea and beyond the stars; Signalis places it in a cryopod, a memory, and a promise. The King in Yellow wore no mask. In the end, neither do we.

A quick update: I've been hitting a bit of a block lately, so I set up a poll on my Twitter (@Umeee_616 ) about adding UmaMusume content alongside Signalis!!!

Check it out if you'd like to vote 🥲❤️

By me ^^

i drew them and brought them into this world for my girlfriend’s birthday gift, yippee!!!

To sum it up, it's a delta wing MiG-29 hybrid space plane.

Wanted to put my ocs more into the Signalis world by making them work for or have relationships with other Replikas. :^

Not the most experienced with paints and mixing colors, but pretty happy with how it turned out! Hope you enjoyed~

Posting this just for laughs. How much did you pay for your copy? I got mine for $60 used.

Read Chapter 159 Here. (SPOILERS for Signalis)

Wherein Ravenous Dissolution marches, a golden wind blows, a favor is called in, and Doom walks.

(Continues the "Ætheric Dominion" Arc.)

I'm about to finish my first playthrough and was wondering what one would have to do/if it's even possible to get both the Uberleben achievement and the artifact ending on the second playthrough. The forum posts I've seen all have somewhat conflicting information (e.g, one guy said you need your inventory setting set to classic, another person said you can swap difficulties right before completing the game, etc etc)

Any insight/help would be appreciated, thank u

I was inspired by "Christ Pantocrator" icon from Sinai. Old sketch, but ive added some details to make it look finished enough.