This post was done by me on Reddit here
I couldn’t help but think that the game is built on Tarkovsky’ masterpiece Solaris. Authors confirmed the influence, but I think it basically shares the same idea.
some spoilers ahead
There are some hints in the game, but I think the strongest ones is the name, which sound similar and ADLR notice that “it’s like everything was taken apart and put back together by someone who doesn’t understand how it works”. Thanks to this post.
In the Solaris movie (based on the Lehm’s book). The astronauts’ scientists are visiting the planet which is covered by “The Ocean” which turns into a kind of alien life (as a whole). The Ocean contacts the astronauts by sending them the entities recreated from their most traumatic and suppressed memories. The entities are almost indistinguishable from real ones, but sometimes Ocean recreates them with minor errors. Eventually the alien research becomes a very painful journey of the scientists into their past.
So in this sense, the Penrose mission was a success. The broken spaceship with a dead Gestalt astronaut and its broken assistant replika, are contacted by the alien life (“the ocean”) after crashing on some distant planet, but not quite in the expected way. The Ocean (in Solaris terms) (Red Eye/G-d/Ocean in Signalis terms), penetrates the mind of Elster and Ariene, and recreates the world, which it knows only by their memories and feelings, and also gives them chance after chance for resolution (fulfilling the promise). But this recreated world is distorted, because the creator “put it back together but doesn’t understand how it works”. For example, the gestalts and replikas turns into mindless zombies in this recreated version. Because that’s how Ariane thinks of them living in the repressive regime. The Ocean’s “replikas of the replikas” (I think authors mentioned this term) are indistinguishible from real ones, and as by-products of this “realness”, they are remembering their previous lives and they even understand in some sense what’s going on (ADLR). In the memory ending the recreation cycle is broken by the Ocean when the internal conflict is resolved by Elster.
Anyway go see the movie 🙂