YMMV / SIGNALIS

• Awesome Art: While the Animesque style is striking on its own, many animated sequences in the game are downright stunning in their composition, use of overlayed text and color giving them an unique and oppressive feeling.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: The description of Ara engineers in readable technical documents — their quiet and seeming "simpleton" behaviour, their tendency to retreat into safe spaces when troubled, and getting along best with the patient and empathetic Eules — is commonly interpreted as Aras (and likely their gestalt neural donor) being on the autism spectrum.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Beo, the wounded Mynah unit that Elster can find in the mines earned quite the following thanks to her friendly yet bleak outlook. Its not uncommon for players to bring healing items just to try and help her, even though there's no way to give her said items and she herself declines "wasting" their resources anyway.
  • The dying Starling and her grieving Eule companion in the mines, hinted by dialogue to be in a romantic relationship, have so much fanart together that you'd assume they were part of the main cast.
• Epileptic Trees: It was inevitable given the nature of the game that all kinds of wild fan theories would spring up to try and answer just what the hell is going on in the plot. Is it some kind of eldritch cosmic horror story? Is it a metaphorical tale of personal tragedy? Should anything be taken at face value? Is it all just a huge Dying Dream? And if so, then for who?
• Fanfic Fuel: The Story Breadcrumbs of the setting and its history are full of gaps for fans to plug. The most prominent gap is the Great Offscreen War between the Nation and the Empire, and by extension the war on Veneta, where Elster's neural donor was a soldier.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Replikas that don't constantly reinforce their identities will eventually begin to recall their human template's memories or even revert to their original human personality, in a process one file calls "Persona degradation." Fans almost immediately nicknamed this process "rampancy"/"going rampant," after a similar process that happens to artificial intelligences in the Marathon and Halo series.
  • "Mrs. Signalis" for Elster. There's also "Cigarette Wife", after one of the more unusual song names found in the soundtrack.
  • "Sniffer" for the corrupted Storch units, due to their "beaks" looking a lot like the long snout of an anteater.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Silent Hill and Dead Space, fellow survival-horror games where the protagonist braves eldritch horrors and hallucinations to find a loved one who has gone missing, while delivering Finishing Stomps to keep their enemies down.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The symptoms of the unknown disease that ravaged the Sierpinski colony include nausea, fever, low blood pressure, and internal hemorrhaging. While never discussed in-game, these are also symptoms of severe radiation poisoning, which happens to be what's killing Ariane.
  • In the same vein, warnings can be found that read, in part "Nothing valued is here. What is...was dangerous and repulsive." These phrases are famously from a report about designing long-term storage facilities for high-level nuclear waste for thousands of years.
  • The Small Bottle found in Nowhere apparently confuses many players who didn't understand what it was meant to do. The description says that it "smells strongly of ammonia," which is a hint that you can use it as smelling salts to wake Isa up.
  • The lockpicking kit that's set up on B2 of the mining colony is a lot easier to figure out if you already know how pin tumbler locks work.
  • The King in Yellow shows up at multiple points in the game. While mostly existing as a direct reference to the Lovecraftian influences of the game, knowledge of one of the short stories included in the collection, The Mask, can help explain some of what is happening in the secret ending.
  • The name and logo of Sierpinski station are a reference to the Sierpiński triangle fractal of infinitely repeating triangular patterns, and the Penrose program's name and logo reference the Penrose triangle optical illusion that appears to depict an impossibly looping triangle. These gain extra significance once you know that everyone in the game is locked in an endlessly-repeating loop.
  • The use of the Swan Lake ballet over the radio to open a box held by the comatose Commander Falke. In the USSR, state television was infamously ordered to broadcast recordings of Swan Lake on loop before the official announcement of the deaths of three major leaders and, eventually, the 1991 coup attempt, giving the song connotations of tragedy and regime change.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: Signalis is a largely humorless and sombre Survival Horror game whose Cosmic Horror Story explores concepts like free will, morality, the value of artificial life, and the idea that Love Hurts, against the backdrop of a remorseless totalitarian dictatorship. The fans, meanwhile, are absolutely smitten with the potential for rampant lesbian shipping and wholesome slice-of-life humor, which only tentatively exists in the setting. It's enough to spawn a minor meme in comment sections, by posting something to the effect of "These characters are pretty cute. I sure hope nothing bad happens to them later."
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Although generally beloved, one common point of criticism against Signalis is that it's too short and doesn't provide very much replayability. A reasonably-fresh first run can take anywhere between five and eight hours to complete, assuming the player is thorough with exploration and read through every single piece of note, with subsequent playthroughs becoming even shorter (speedruns can be as short as less than an hour), as one will have already known what to do and where to go. Due to the lack of unlocks, the only incentives for replaying the game would be 100% Completion of achievements (which can all be gotten in a single playthrough), while the play time issue is only addressed by deliberately dragging a session out to hit the point requirements for the "Promise" ending, which takes twelve-plus hours.
• It Was His Sled: Elster and Ariane being in love is the game's third act twist that contextualizes a lot of Elster's behaviour, but it's the first thing you'll learn upon being exposed to any memes, fanart and discussion of the game.
• LGBT Fanbase: Due to its relatively wholesome and meaningful depiction of queer relationships, implied or otherwise, and a predominantly-female cast of characters, Signalis is very popular among the LGBT community. The fan interests extends much further beyond just Elster's relationship with Arianne, with the other Replikas (sans Adler for obvious reasons) also getting significant attention and shipping in Fanon.
• Memetic Badass: In direct defiance of his typical Memetic Loser status, Adler is also occasionally viewed in a significantly more positive light by many fans, though typically ironically, with his obsession with Falke and the numerous fast ones he pulled on Elster being exaggerated to comical degrees. This depiction of him is thus known as "Chadler".
• Memetic Loser: Adler tends to be the butt of jokes about him being The One Guy in a sea of lesbian shipping, for his apparent unrequited love for Commander Falke, and getting stabbed in the eye. Being a Hate Sink and the closest thing the story has to a main villain also makes him ripe for comedic abuse.
• Memetic Personality Change: The emotionally-sensitive Kolibri is very commonly depicted in fanfiction as either a mischievous gremlin who likes to use bioresonance to mess with her fellow Replikas for shits and giggles, or a huge Shipper on Deck for all of the horny lesbian robots in Sierpinski to the point of actively urging them on with her mental powers. Behold, sesbian lex.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • By far the most contentious element of the game is the limited inventory of being able to carry only six items at once. While this is explained in-universe as the "rule of six" and most likely a way to cause more tension by forcing the player to consider their choices - in practice it mostly results in a massive amount of back-and-forth movement between safe rooms for many reasons: plot-relevant puzzle items take up space, so do any equipped gun/tool you have with you (even the flashlight you need to explore some plot-critical rooms), usable items and ammo stack to a relatively small amount after which you simply cannot take more of them (even if you have free inventory space). It's not unusual to enter a room and then immediately leave to go back to the safe room either to store what you found or because the room had more items than you could carry.
    • This has been addressed in Version 1.2, with the Flashlight and Eidetic Modules no longer taking up inventory slots. This is implemented as an option in the settings menu, meaning one could use either the pre- or post-1.2 inventory system if they so desired.
  • While you can reload weapons using ammo on the ground, you can't immediately use healing items this way.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Cigarette Wife sounds remarkably similar to Military Precision from Half-Life, to the point that a remix was made combining the two songs together.
• Theme Pairing: One of the more popular non-canon ships in the fandom is Kolibri and Storch, just for the amusement of pairing the shortest replika model (5'0") with the one of the tallest (7'8").
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion:
  • The name of the EULR/Eule units is quite commonly mispronounced by players who don't speak German, with the correct pronunciation sounding approximately like "oil-er" instead of "you-ler".
  • The MNHR/Mynah tends to trip players up as well. The correct pronunciation sounds a lot like their actual job, "mine-ah".
• The Woobie:
  • Ariane's life was extremely miserable: her Blithe Spirit mentality meant she was consistently ostracized and bullied in the Eusian society to the point she thought that being sent alone into space was the better option. While she did find happiness in her relationship with Elster the suicidal nature of their mission caused her to fall into depression and later on she suffered extreme radiation poisoning due to their leaking reactor. Furthermore it's heavily implied that she is still alive in some form, either via cryo-sleep or bioresonance/eldritch means and in incredible pain to the point all she wants is for Elster to fulfill their promise and kill her, but even that might be getting undone by reality resetting.
  • The corrupted Replika units. Particularly the poor EULRs, who were more or less helpless due to lack of combat ability and the persona degredation they suffered from having their music player destroyed by an irate Storch.

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