I already warned in my analysis of Signalis and the memory still lingers in my mind. I was tricked by rose-engine, just like what happened to millions of players around the world 24 years ago with Metal Gear Solid and the unforgettable battle with Psycho Mantis. Elster’s journey does not end where we thought.
An uncomfortable night’s dream
Throughout the eight hours that the title lasts, we are very clear that the planet we are on is not exactly friendly. Killer androids, corpses everywhere and many doubts to solve. After advancing with a trembling hand, through the darkness and pointing the shotgun straight ahead, we arrived at a very particular area.
Everything is covered with raw flesh, the metal is rusty and huge tentacles roam freely. Anyone would say that we have changed the video game and we are in the cursed dimension from Silent Hill, but we’re still on signaled. After solving puzzles of all kinds, we arrive at a cylindrical exit with some stairs that go up inside.
Adler is at the end, always holding out as the last barrier before reaching the Penrose ship. A knife through his eye does not prevent him from fulfilling his task and nothing stops Elster from moving forward, so the former’s fate is fatal. The red void awaits her and she finds corpses of herself scattered across the floor.
The Penrose stands a few meters away with Alina waiting for him to fulfill the promise they have kept for so many years. Elster climbs into the hull, attempts to open the hatch, and ends up with an arm torn off from the effort. Without strength, he ends up falling to the ground and passing away while we see how that characteristic red color of his eye fades. The energy has left you. Screenshot of “end” and credits; It’s over.
Or not? The truth is that it will have happened to more than one of you that you thought that it had come this far signaled. It happened to me to the point of turning off the PS5 and dedicating myself to other tasks. With doubts, I started the game again days later to find that no, this was far from having reached its final chapter.
an endless cycle
After starting the game again, we will see the Elster and Alina’s last moments at the Penrose, when they were happy in the immensity of space. When they didn’t care if their mission would pay off or not. A glimpse of a better world, without complications, without Eusan’s empire bothering her and being able to make her own decisions. However, Elster wakes up, composes himself in the middle of the snow, enters the Penrose, gets a new body and launches into his only mission.
The jump is difficult to explain, because we suddenly found ourselves in one of the bathrooms where we had previously been, with no further information on what had happened. What is clear is that the cycle repeats itself and this is where everything indicates that rose-engine has taken the eternal return as a basic postulate on which it orbits signaled.
We are talking about a philosophical concept that tells us about a continuous repeat of the timeline and whose only purpose is to die to restart everything once more. Each act, each movement, thought, success and error will occur in the same way, without any margin for speculation.
Although there are thinkers and authors of all kinds who have interpreted it -the first to shape it was Kybalion- the truth is that the most widespread vision is the one offered by Friedrich Nietzsche. The German philosopher raised a question in many of his books, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The question was as follows: “If you had to live this life over and over again, how would you do it?”
Nietzsche proposes that, in any case, It must be the human being himself who takes the reins of that life valuing the present at all times. He denies the Christian position that there is a promising future to look forward to, so approaching the carpe diem it is much more fruitful for humanity. The one who is capable of achieving it will be conceived as a superman, the one who is above the rest, since he has made every moment wonderful for him and he embraces it without remedy. In this way, the hypothetical vision of a cyclical life does not frighten him, but excites him, and he will always choose to experience it again.
It is an appeal to the power of the human will to break with the established rules and an example that Nietzsche used in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Only the superman will be able to accept pain and loneliness, he will shine to build a new morality, he will destroy the one built by Christianity and will be judge and executioner. A cry yes to life.
To stage this fact, the philosopher created a situation in which a shepherd is threatened by a snake. Zarathustra thinks that the best option is for him to bite the snake’s head to kill it, but the shepherd is completely paralyzed with terror. At one point, he plucks up his courage, bites off the head and frees himself from the reptile. For Nietzsche, it is a clear example of how the will and the human decision allow to end the oppression of time to live with vitality.
Is the eternal return what we live in signaled? Difficult to prove, as Yuri Stern has already pointed out that there are many interpretations of what is happening. However, the Elster we see arriving before the false ending seems to doubt her, being bombarded by images of Arnold Blöckin’s painting and failing in her mission to keep Alina’s promise.
On the next occasion, in the new cycle, we return to the same point where we were. Adler blocking the way and Elster determined to go forward. This time, she does manage to reach the Penrose, although the endings split as we well know. In one Elster stays with Alina forever, in another she decides to keep her promise and in another she thinks her best option is never to have been there. Whatever we see on the screen, it is clear that Elster acts on her own initiative and ends up breaking the loop that Alina is subjected to with her bioresonance powers. In the end, ending everything was always in her hand.
