Signal Is An Ingenious Take On The Point-And-Click Style

Oddly Shaped Pixels recently released Signal, a sci-fi point-and-click adventure game with a twist. In it you play as Emilia, a woman making a delivery to a remote scientific facility. Upon arriving, you discover that the entire staff of the facility is dead—except for one man. Trey, the survivor, is severely injured and rapidly deteriorating, and you are in a race against time to save his life and figure out what happened. 

Originally created for a 14 day long game jam, Signal changes the genre by having you observe the world through a rotating birds-eye camera angle. You can have your character perform various actionslicking on various buildings in this digital diorama. Rather than actually observing them, Emilia describes what she is doing in detail (in surprisingly good voice acting). 

However, the clock is ticking, and even small actions eat up precious time. Signal has you on a time limit of eight hours for pickup and just three hours for Trey’s life. This is another interesting mechanic, as I am certainly guilty of retrying every item on every object when I am stuck in a point-and-click game. You need to reduce how often you go from building to building and repeating actions, otherwise, the survivor will never make it.

Signal is available for free (with a name-your-price option, of course) on itch.io. If you’re good, you can probably beat it within half an hour. You can download the game for yourself by clicking the link here.