Indie projects that tell about the new achievements of humanity, the harsh technological reality and immersion in different layers of consciousness are becoming a fashionable hobby. Company Playmestudio released a psychological thriller The Signifier, offering a look at the forensics of the future, where the search for the killer is carried out using a digital cast of the victim’s brain.
At the center of the story is the brilliant scientist Frederick Russell, who, together with his colleague, created a unique system called Dreamwalker, which is able to scan the human brain and design three-dimensional interactive worlds from where important information can be obtained. Frederick not only developed an artificial intelligence system, but is also an excellent psychoanalyst, whose services are used by special government services. So, the police department of the Technological Safeguard Bureau asks him to investigate the suicide of the manager of a large technology company, Joanna Cast, whose death looks too suspicious. Not daring to refuse, Frederic goes into the shards of Joanna’s mind, traveling between the past and the present and fishing for evidence after evidence.
The gameplay of The Signifier resembles standard walking simulators. You travel between the base locations, looking for items, solving the problems of your beloved daughter, or just sleeping in your own warm bed. Everything changes in the Dreamwalker world. Here you need to explore the layers of objective and subjective reality, find clues, missing fragments of the memory of the victim of a crime. You are asked to rewind time, pick up pieces of memories, give them the correct shape and insert them into place. At one point, you have to turn into a dog to get into a closed room.
The riddles themselves are not complex, but they require precise patterning or an exceptionally accurate shape of memories, which causes pixel hunting syndrome. In one of the places it is not entirely clear what is required of you, and long walks through curved spaces begin to tire you a lot. Sometimes you come back to reality and use data from your subconscious to discover new places, search for codes, and get new sites to explore in the victim’s past.
The game looks quite stylish, it seems that many of the levels with bizarre shapes and pastel colors and the style of expressionist paintings were, if not created, then processed using a neural network. However, it would be great if such sections took up a small part of the game time, because after several hours of wandering in such an environment, the visual solutions of the developers begin to cause rejection.
