Signalis Story Explained: Elster, Ariane and the Promise

Signalis is a survival horror game by rose-engine, the two-person German studio of Yuri Stern and Barbara Wittmann, published by Humble Games and PLAYISM on 27 October 2022. You play Elster, a Replika searching for someone she has lost, in a story told almost entirely through notes, flashbacks and dreamlike jumps. This page puts the plot in order, separates what the game states from what fans infer, and explains the ending. It has full spoilers. (Signalis)

Before the story begins#

Humanity lives across one solar system split between two powers. The Empire was founded by the Grand Empress, whose power, a banned book claims, gave life to the first Replikas. The Eusan Nation broke away from it, with Replikas on its side, and is still at war with it. The Nation is a police state where Replikas run everything, from schools to prison camps, and humans are called Gestalts. (Signalis)

Two things matter going in. Replikas are copies of a real person's mind, called a neural pattern, and the copy is imperfect: the template's memories can resurface. And the Nation's Penrose Program sends one Gestalt officer and one Replika into deep space to look for new worlds, with orders that by the final phase amount to a death sentence. (Signalis)

The crash and the book#

Elster wakes on the Penrose-512, crashed in deep snow. The ship is empty, and the second cryo pod has been drained. A photo on the flight deck shows a white-haired woman. Elster takes it, goes outside, passes a gate and climbs down a hole in the ground into a small bedroom, where an old book bound in yellow lies on the desk. It "feels like it is calling" to her. She picks it up: The King in Yellow. (Signalis)

Next she is standing at a washroom mirror at S-23 Sierpinski, an AEON facility on the frozen world Leng, where Gestalt prisoners were sent to mine ore and make ammunition. The photo she carries now shows a different woman in uniform, Alina Seo, and Elster is sure Alina is the person she has come for. (Signalis)

S-23 Sierpinski#

The facility has fallen. A wounded Star guard tells Elster that the camp is lost, that the Gestalt workers were all sent to the mine below, and that the mine lift needs the administrator's key. In the library Elster meets Isa Itou, a Gestalt from Rotfront who has come looking for her twin sister Erika and warns Elster to turn back. Most of the Replika staff have been "corrupted": their bodies have swollen and split, and they get back up unless their corpses are burned. (Signalis)

Elster works down through the dormitories, an interrogation block and the hospital. Notes left behind tell what happened. The guards had searched and interrogated prisoners, then a sickness spread through Gestalts and Replikas alike, the commander fell ill, and the remaining staff locked down. In the old medical ward Elster fights a corrupted Mynah, a hulking mining Replika. (Signalis)

Then Adler, the facility's administrator Replika, appears. He welcomes her, looks at the photo, names Alina as a factory worker, and pushes Elster into a lift shaft with the words "You shouldn't have returned." She lands on a pile of dead Elster units that fills the shaft. (Signalis)

On the Protektor floors she meets the last sane staff. Storch Sieben, the Protektor Controller, is waiting for orders that will never come. The last uncorrupted Kolibri hides in the library, cut off from her sisters, whose "song" she can no longer bear. Elster also passes the rooms of Falke, the Protektor commander, and reads her diary: Falke went beyond a red gate below the mines and came back with someone else's memories in her head. Adler's diaries show the same days repeating, with entries he cannot remember writing. Elster uses an astrolabe hidden in the library to open the safe in his study, takes his key and rides down into the mine. (Signalis)

The mines and Nowhere#

In the mines Elster meets Beo, a dying Mynah who asks not to be repaired, and a crying Eule beside a dying Star. Elsewhere Adler, armed with a rifle, hunts Isa through the tunnels. He tells her he has done this "countless times" and that she does not belong there; Isa stabs him in the eye and he falls into a hole. (Signalis)

Down a well and a vast hole lie a dark shore and then Nowhere, a maze of flesh, cages and shrines. Here Isa shoots a monster off Elster with Adler's rifle and collapses, sick and short of breath, before handing the rifle over. Elster finds Alina Seo's last diary entry, written down here: her hair is turning white and she remembers "a different name, and a different life". She also finds a note called The Dreamer, about a dreamer floating in a sea of flesh while the red eye makes a new world from the dream. She sets six stone plates, the same seals that bind the book, into a door to open the way out. (Signalis)

At the top waits a red gate and Adler, with Isa's knife still in his eye. He tells her the commander went past the gate and came back changed. Elster says it doesn't matter and walks on, across a red desert lined with the bodies of other Elsters, to the Penrose-512. Two questions appear: who are you, and what are you looking for? Flashbacks show the war on Vineta and a soldier who served beside Alina Seo; the usual reading is that this soldier was Elster's template. The face she has been chasing is not Alina's. It is Ariane Yeong's. Elster climbs the ship, her arm tears away, and she falls and dies. The credits roll. (Signalis)

The truth on the Penrose#

This is the false ending. Pick any option on the title screen and Elster wakes on the Penrose-512 again, and this time she remembers. The ship is full of traces of the life she shared with Ariane: her paint, her notes, the films the programme told her never to show an Elster unit. Ariane's notes tell the story. She joined to escape Rotfront, grew close to the Replika she was told to ignore, taught her to dance and fell in love. At cycle 3000 the final phase began. The message from home said the ship would fail and suggested she ask her Replika to spare her a slow death, or take permanent rest in the cryo pod. They celebrated the 3,000th cycle anyway. Ariane was already losing her hair by then; later notes have her losing teeth, unable to sleep and begging for it to stop. (Signalis)

The dead Elster on the ship gives the rest. Her last thought is that she could not keep her promise, because she fell ill too. The Elster who died on the Penrose was meant to end Ariane's suffering and did not live long enough. Ariane was left in the cryo pod. (Signalis)

Rotfront#

Elster goes back down through Sierpinski and out into Rotfront Sektor C, Ariane's home district, now dark and dreamlike. She walks through Ariane's life: the apartment where she lived, the Yeong photo store, the Itou family's bookstore and her school. In the bookstore she finds Isa, who has given up on finding Erika; Isa reaches for Elster and melts into the floor. A shrine to both twins suggests they were already dead. A cutscene shows Adler sitting by the sleeping Falke. He tells her she has changed, that it is as if everything was taken apart and put back together by someone who doesn't understand how it works, and kisses her. (Signalis)

Elster gathers tarot cards and solves the district's puzzles, reading Ariane's teacher's report and her mother's letter about the photo of Alina along the way, and reaches the bedroom from the start of the game. Now she knows it is Ariane's. The King in Yellow lies on the desk, its seals gone. (Signalis)

Through the door Falke waits, floating over her bed. "There's nothing for you here," she says, "she doesn't even want us anymore," and then, "Both of us are incomplete, let us become whole again." Elster kills her with her own spears. Back at the red gate Adler stands in her way, calls her a selfish monster and warns that if she goes back, everything will fall apart. He stabs her in the eye; she shoots him. Dying, she reaches the Penrose and the cryo pod. (Signalis)

The ending explained#

The game picks one of three endings from how you played. In Leave, Elster cannot bring herself to go in and walks away to die. In Memory, Ariane wakes but does not know her, and Elster dies at her side. In Promise, Ariane remembers and begs Elster to keep her word, and Elster does, then dies beside her. A secret fourth ending, available only after finishing the game once, shows Elster laying lilies at a ritual site and dancing with Ariane on the wrecked ship under a red eye. Each one is explained on the Signalis endings page. (Signalis)

What the game states#

Some things are on the record. Elster and Ariane were lovers on the Penrose-512. The ship failed, Ariane was dying of what reads as radiation sickness, and the programme expected the Replika to kill her or freeze her. The original Elster died first. LSTR overview papers say new Elster units were built from a decommissioned Penrose Program unit. Falke's diary says the red eye beyond the gate filled her with Elster's memories. Adler's diaries prove the facility's days repeat, and Alina's diary shows her becoming someone else. (Signalis)

What is real#

Very little of Sierpinski behaves like a real place by the end, and the game never says which parts are. The safest reading is that the Penrose-512 and Ariane in the cryo pod are real, and that the rest is a world being bent around her. Rotfront in particular is a memory, with Ariane's school, home and friends rearranged like a dream. One detail backs this up: Ariane's workforce letter says that if no programme accepted her, she would be assigned to S-23 Sierpinski. It is the life she escaped. (Signalis)

The main readings#

Ariane is the dreamer. The most common reading. Ariane, a bioresonant with a gift she never knew about, lies dying in the cryo pod, and her dream is the world the game takes place in. The Dreamer note fits. So do Adler's dream of testing a white-haired girl with planet cards, Alina turning into Ariane, and Falke being flooded with Elster's memories when she looks at the red eye. On this reading Elster keeps coming back because Ariane keeps dreaming her, and each loop corrupts the world a little more, which is what Adler fears. The game never confirms that Ariane is bioresonant or that she is the dreamer. (Signalis)

A copy of a copy. The Elster we play is probably not the one who loved Ariane. She may be a Sierpinski Elster carrying the Penrose unit's copied pattern, and she has died many times already. Stern has said a central question of the game is the worth of "a replica, a copy of a copy", though he said it while talking about the game's own identity next to its influences. On this reading the story asks whether a copy's love and promise are real. (Signalis; How the Silent Hill-Inspired SIGNALIS Tried to Forge Its Own Identity)

Cosmic horror. The King in Yellow, the red eye and the flesh below Leng may be a real outside power, not just symbols. The book's seals come off as Elster goes deeper, and the secret ending looks like a completed ritual. The game never explains what the red eye is. (Signalis)

Grief. Read plainly, the endings are ways of letting go: walking away, staying until the end, or keeping a terrible promise. The developers have said they did not mean for players to replay for other endings, and Stern has been sad to see them called good or bad. (Signalis; How the Silent Hill-Inspired SIGNALIS Tried to Forge Its Own Identity)

Where it fits#

Signalis is a single, self-contained game, so everything here is the whole story. For the order of events behind it, from the Empire to the loop, see the Signalis timeline. For who everyone is, see Signalis characters. (Signalis)