Signalis is an old-school style horror adventure game about a robotic clone girl trying to find her friends in the midst of a zombie-like plague. There’s a lot of it. So it’s understandable that there are a lot of conclusions. This long essay guide is my attempt to explain the ending of Signalis. Buckle up.

The Smoking Gun of Signalis: The Photo 

To explain how Signalis ends, let’s start from the beginning. You play Elster, a robot clone who awakens in a crashed spaceship with a mission to investigate a fascist society. She was a mechanic on Penrose 512. Their only goal now is to find the ship’s pilot, Ariane Yong. Magpie finds this photo hanging on the dashboard:

This photo is the key to understanding Signalis. The prologue ends with Elster using the code on the back of the photo to exit the spaceship and explore the white snowy landscape. She finds refuge in this strange bunker. Upon touching the flashing wall, various images appear in Elster’s gaze, including the red lettering “Don’t forget your promise.”

Elster blinks as she wakes up in Sierpinski’s bathroom, and the photo still in Elster’s inventory has changed.

It’s now a brown-haired woman named Alina Theo. For me, and maybe for you too, this was the moment I thought “Oh, this game is going to be interesting.”

Skip to the end and let’s get started.

The Multiple Endings of Signalis

When I first “played” Signaris, I was confused and immediately looked online for answers, only to discover that I’d been thoroughly duped by the wrong ending.

Yuri Stern, one of two members of the Rose Engine development team, told Waypoint: “It may be a strange habit, but I don’t complete most of the games I play, even if I really enjoy them. So, in a way, this ending was my attempt to make sure that even people like me who don’t normally complete games get to see the ending. That way, they can stop when they’ve had enough.”

When I realized there was more, I knew I had to go back to finish Signaris.

After Deception, there are three main endings depending on your play style, and a secret epilogue that will require many replays to achieve. You can (re)watch them all here.

Personally, I got the “Promise” ending, where Magpie finds the aforementioned Ariane, says goodbye to her, and kills her.

As the game progresses, the player discovers that Elster and Ariane are the only two living beings aboard the Penrose 512. Despite strict rules forbidding any kind of intimacy, Elster and Ariane first became friends, then lovers. During their lonely mission, the two promised to kill each other rather than suffer and die alone. It’s all heartbreaking.

Elster discovers the bodies of the other LSTRs in an abandoned spaceship. I figured out the different endings to show the journeys of the other Magpies (and pretty much stand in for other players, even though the game isn’t online at all) and whether they were successful or not.

Barbara Whitman, another member of the Rose Engine, said in the same interview: “It was never our intention for players to replay the game to get a different ending. Rather, we wanted every player to be able to get the ending that suited their playstyle.

The ending of Signalis, explained

I believe Signaris is set within an elaborate dream world that the sick and dying Ariane Yong has created in the hopes of reuniting with her lover Magpie, a long-lost LSTR unit member.

Ariane builds one dream after another, desperately trying to make her hopes come true. Ariane and Elstar swear to kill each other rather than die slowly alone, but Elstar’s mechanical body soon gives up.

As the game’s plot and lore progress, we learn some things that we “know” to be true. One of them is that Ariane Yong has been accepted into a space exploration mission called Project Penrose.

Project Penrose sends a human and a robot — in this case Ariane and LSTR (the protagonist’s special forces nickname is “Magpie”) — aboard a ship to the edge of space in search of a habitable planet. A place where they can settle. He warns his soldiers that Operation Penrose will likely fail. If they fail to find a planet by a certain date, Ariane will receive instructions from the government urging the humans to accept instant death. But she isn’t.

Why Ariane Creates the Signalis Dream

Ariane Yong is a bit of a rebel. She paints. She plays on the radio. She was raised by her mother, not the country. She doesn’t allow herself to be swept away by political glamour without questioning. The player can find a sealed document titled “Confidential, Read Now – Pilots Only” that Ariane never opened. It instructs human pilots not to befriend their robot companions or let them watch war movies to avoid triggering potential negative gestalt memories.

From Elster’s comments and the three main endings above, we can see that Ariane did not accept a quick death. Partially kept in a cryogenic chamber. The player can find a diary entry about her being sick. Elster remembers that she fell into an addiction to robot programming. It seems likely that either Ariane has been put into a prolonged state of suspended animation, or Elstar has done it “IRL”. In the past, they have promised to kill each other rather than let them live alone in suffering. But Ariane is stuck, not dead, but not quite alive either.

In the trappings of illness and uncertainty, Ariane imagines how things could have been different. But she is no ordinary human. She has a high bio-resonance, has created fully fleshed out dream worlds, and on top of that, she is a god.

With the “Promise” ending of Signalis, Elstar finally frees them both from their endless suffering. For me, it felt like the “real/true ending”, but I think your opinion on the ending of Signalis will vary depending on your personal values ​​regarding love and loss. However, the cutscene we see at the end is just the beginning of our attempt to understand Signalis.

How do we know that Signalis is a “dream”? Because of Ariane’s bioresonance
We know from the game’s documentation that this universe is characterized by bioresonance. The player can find the forbidden book “Song of the Gods”. Its description is as follows: We all dance, but only a few can hear the song… Every now and then, people are born who can not only hear and play the music of this world, but also direct it. “Those gifted people who can manipulate the very essence of the world around them.”

An Imperial spy tells us that he met Ariane while working in Photoshop, and felt that she had incredible bio-resonant abilities that he himself was unaware of. It. With this knowledge, we see the end of the game in a different light. Perhaps Ariane doesn’t even know exactly what she’s doing.

The Relationship Between Ariane Yeong & Alina Seo in Signalis 

For me, this photo at the beginning of the game is one of the key pieces of evidence pointing to the “dream” interpretation of the Signaris ending.

If Magpie keeps this photo in her pocket, she can show it to a few other untainted souls and ask them if they saw Alina. She later finds Alina’s Worker Key. As the game progresses, Elster finds a diary from Alina, in which she mentions some confused memories, such as remembering Elster, even though Sierpinski was not assigned a Magpie.

Finally, we learn that Ariane Yong and Alina Seo met briefly “in real life” on the planet Rotfort. Ariane works at her family business, Yon Photo, developing several images for Alina, a traveling soldier. Ariane and her aunt discuss how similar Ariane and Alina look. One photo shows Alina with another soldier who has lost an eye, which we’ll explain later.

In a flashback, we see that Ariane was brutally bullied by other students at the Red Front because she was an outsider. Her friend Isa witnessed the ordeal but was too scared to intervene. Then Iso’s twin sister, Erika, stepped in. From other documents we know that Ariane had asked her to take on Penrose’s expedition missions, and if not, to at least become a soldier.

I think this is to show how much Ariane admired Alina’s courage, adventure and friendship.

Additionally, all robot clone brands are based on real people called Gestalten. The LSTR machine series, which also includes Elstar, are based on soldiers from the planet Vineta.

By examining the storyline in the game in detail, we can conclude that Elster’s figure is Vinetan, the eyeless one seen in the photo with Alina, further complicating her representational relationship in the dream space.

Going a step further, there is a strong theory that this other soldier is Ito Lilith. If this surname sounds familiar, it’s because she was the mother of Ariane’s friends Isa and Erica. Connected to the connection for spiritual crossroads by Ariane Yong Alina Seo. In this dream space, it makes sense that “Lilus” (the magpie) would be searching for her friend Alina (Arian’s stand-in).

Yes, there are a lot of them.

A Timeloop in a Dream

Remember our false ending? This is another major clue that the player still doesn’t know what’s really going on. Adler begs Elster not to go there as it will “destroy everything”. Adler tells him he’s been here before but never like this. Not only do we know we’re in a time loop, we know that Elster is helping to break the cycle.

As the game continues from here, we see Ariane “fade in” over Elster’s corpse. (To watch, check out this video at linked timestamp 4:59:34; screenshots below) To me, this is evidence that the game takes place within a dream, because we know Ariane can no longer stand. This is her, as the dreamer, choosing to continue the dream.

When Elster wakes up from her supposed death, she finds herself back on the spaceship Penrose 512. She rips off the arm of her former self and welds it to her body. We repeat some of the first puzzles in the game, but with an even more horrifying and dilapidated version of the ship. This time, when she enters the cryogenic chamber, she becomes a pulsating mass of flesh, similar to the Nowhere section of the game.

The architecture of the dream world is crumbling. Other characters are rotting. Isa collapses, leaving behind a mass of shadow. According to the in-game documentation, this is what happens when a character is ravaged by a mysterious disease. The eagle appears grotesque, with her skin peeling off. He leans over Falke’s motionless body and complains that it seems as if “everything has fallen apart.” Ariane’s creation takes time.

Dream Logic

If the entire game could be redesigned to allow you to enter an active dream world (like Inception), a lot of things would make more sense. Magpie travels through vast and disconnected places. They range from Ariane’s childhood radio tower home to Rotfort, the school she attended (where all space is occupied by bulbous fleshy organs that inspired Ariane), to a grotesque hole that seems to be at the edge of the known universe. At one point, she crawls through a small hole in the wall and ends up in Ariane’s high school home. We jump through time and space in ways that should be impossible.

Isa also falls ill and accepts that her sister Erica will probably be gone forever. As Isa dies, everything melts away from her like ink in a vase and her body disappears. As Elster searches the shelves, he finds what appears to be two commemorative photographs of Isa and Erica. The sequence suggests that the twins may have been dead for a long time. Once again… dream logic folding in time/temporality.

Finally, in dreams our minds sometimes place one character “on top” of another to represent something different. Alina Seo is a soldier who looks similar to Ariane Yeong. They only met briefly in Yeong Photoshop. Since the two overlap in the dream state, Ariane’s version may have had a strong, healthy body and a life of companionship. (Hospital records show that Ariane was often sickly.)

Commander Falke and the Red Eye

Shortly before the events of the game, Commander of Falcon Squad, Sierpinski, went to the afterlife. She discovered the truth that she and everyone else she knew were part of a false dream reality. Unable to deal with this reality, the Commander suffers a nervous breakdown. Because she is a leader and a powerful bio-resonator, her loss of self affected the entire facility. She told Adler that she saw a large red eye.

The red eye appears several times in the game, first in a document describing a reaction to political propaganda against a planetary phenomenon. Later, the commander writes in her diary that she saw it, and that he saw it. In the secret ending, the red eye is seen hanging high in the sky. Ariane is one of the few characters in the game with red eyes, and considering the eerie secret ending ritual, I think it’s a nod to this reality being under Ariane’s control.

In later levels of the game, Falke seems to take the place of another Ariane, which makes sense since this is Ariane’s world again. A note from Falke indicates that she has “become one” with Ariane; so much so that Falke complains to Elster that “you will never dance with us again.”

Furthermore, within the pulsating physical level, we find the dreamer’s room, as stylized as Falke’s, who has fallen into eternal sleep with the knowledge of the truth.

Adler and the Other LSTRs 

Falke’s number two is Adler, the only male-looking robot clone. He appears throughout the game, judging, staring, poking and prodding. He speaks cruelly without much detail until just before the false ending. Adler begs Elster not to be selfish, not to move on, not to ruin this world for “everyone”. He claims they’ve done “this” before. He tells her she should never have come back.

At one point in the game, Adler pushes Magpie down an elevator shaft. She wakes up to find herself surrounded by dozens of other LSTR scaffoldings. Reddit users estimate there are around 75 bodies, meaning he’s done this at least 75 times.

Players can discover Adler’s diary. His diary reveals that he is reliving the same day over and over again. Each time he writes in his diary, he becomes more panicked as he realizes what is happening. When in doubt, he falls back on his systemic nature and the mandate of his country.

With his beloved superior gone, Adler, acting as second-in-command, assumes the task of protecting the only reality he knows. He knows that Adler and the other clones only exist in a dream state; either he has a consciousness or it is some kind of safeguard activated by Ariane to prevent Elster from breaking the loop.

The Repetition of the Missing Eye 

Over the course of the game, many characters have their eyes gouged out in one photo, including Adler, Aisa, Elster himself, and even a person who is presumably the basis for Elster.

Eyes represent vision, understanding, clarity, and perspective. Losing an eye symbolizes a distorted view of the world. Additionally, its repetition across multiple characters again alludes to the cyclical nature of recurring dreams and shows how all these memories are connected for Ariane.

Using Asset Analysis to Compare

There are a few theories on Reddit that focus specifically on the visual assets used as points of comparison between characters to make sense of it all. User Sinobis wrote:

“However, after looking at the image asset dump, I noticed that Sierpinski’s work passport photo of Alina (presumably taken before Falke got sick and the chaos began) and Ariane in the cryocapsule in the End are bandaged almost exactly in the same place. This lends credence to the theory that Sierpinski-Alina is just a self-insertion of Ariane dreaming of a possible world where she was not accepted into the Penrose Program, and that Alina’s return to Ariane is an awakening from the dream.”

However, another thread on Reddit (which I was unfortunately unable to find again) compared the character models of each character, showing that most of the facial structures are fairly similar. The user emphasized the practical point that the game is made by a very small number of people, and encouraged other users not to read too much into the art, as the variations have been kept simple, presumably to reduce the amount of work.

The Island Paintings in Signalis

In the second half of Signalis, Elster repeatedly encounters different images of the island, which I understood as a metaphor for a place of freedom, far from oppression and authoritarian control.

The different styles show how Ariane painted the island again and again, dreaming and hoping for a world beyond the one she knows. She is obsessed. Your mind cannot help but bring this vision to the forefront. She never seems to fully complete the painting, and art once again becomes a medium for unfulfilled dreams and lost loves.

Later in the game, Elster also wakes up on a sort of reality version of the island, but it’s dark and lonely, peppered with melancholic and mysterious tones. Ariane has never been to the sea, even though she would like to, so the sea becomes an unfulfilling place for her.

The main image on the island is a beautiful oil painting, but I think it’s in the public domain because it’s used so often. It’s “The Island of the Dead” by Arnold Böcklin from 1880, and it shows a rower (or woman), a figure illuminated by a white shroud, and a coffin.

Near the end of the game, a copy of this painting stands in the room where Ariane lived as a teenager, and inside is a tarot card titled “The Lovers”. We know that Ariane is a dreamer. She wanted to go on a romantic mission with a special person, far from the world she knows. And eventually she did.

The Creators of Signalis on the Dream Theory

As with dreams and dream analysis, it’s a good idea to go back to the beginning. In the aforementioned Waypoint interview, Yuri Stern reflected: “I always felt a strong need to give stories a dream-like quality, but often things ended up feeling a bit too mundane, so I thought about what my dreams felt like and applied that to the way I told the story. ”

Barbara Wittmann said in an interview with Bloody Disgusting: “The theme of the game is the feeling of being ‘other’ and not being able to fit into an authoritarian society. It also combines themes that we were both really excited about and passionate about: dreams, androids, horror, retro tech sci-fi.”

In summary… 

The Magpie as we know it is the product of Ariane’s deep subconscious.

In the dream reality, Elster is searching for her lost love. When she finally finds it, the Magpie will do something. I tend to read the promise reading as “for the best” since Elster fulfills her promise to kill Ariana and is finally able to free her and everyone else from her loop. After killing Ariane, Elster takes his last breath next to his lover.

In the secret ending, a ritual places some LSTR unit objects that were important to Ariane on a pedestal, a kind of sacrifice. LSTR then appears to die and the camera pans to Red Eye and switches to a black and white “replay” of Elster and Ariane dancing together in the spaceship, slowly fading out.

My understanding of the secret ending of Signaris is that it’s about accepting her death together, and that it’s a memory that the two of them want to relive and remember together in their final moments.

What is Signalis about? 

I think Signaris is looking at us at a time when it really matters, through the lens of a supposed horror survival story about robots. When faced with big decisions, what will we choose? How will we act? Will we stand up for our friends and protect them from bullies? Will we have the courage to let go of our loved ones? Will we choose to hide in our memories and live in the past, or will we choose to boldly venture into the unknown despite the pain and conflict?

Signalis reminds me of the famous quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson: “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” I think the developers of Rose-Engine agree.

I actually have no idea if I’m right. Maybe that’s the point? 

These are just my theories after all. Just before publishing this article, I read a Reddit theory by @TheMightyNovac that described a more literal interpretation of a spaceship crash landing, and it was so plausible that I almost didn’t care.

The story of Signalis is so vast, and the ending so ambiguous, that it spawned a community of love and obsession on its subreddit. Nine months after its release, people are still talking about Signalis, which is probably only achievable if the answers are never found.

As far as I know, there is no “official” end to Signalis. The creators, two-man studio Rose-Engine, have been very tight-lipped about the ending. So far, they have only said that they believe “there is no good or bad ending” and that the game should be seen as an exploration of “otherness.”

If you’ve played Signalis, do you agree with my outline of the theory? What did I miss? Can someone help me understand this game? The Signalis wiki also has an entire section called “Theory” with a page for each one. Let me know in the comments what the heck’s going on.

We’re all just trying to make sense of this incredibly emotional and terrifying love story – life.