Letters of Recommendation: Signalis, Mushroom Coffee

Since I've spent most of today waiting for a delayed train or on said train, I decided to write about two of the things that got me through it.

1) Signalis

This 2022 game by Berlin studio Rose Engine has been sitting in my Steam library for a few months now, and I finally picked it up this week. I play a lot of artsy indie games, but I don't think I often see overlap between those and the survival horror genre. This threads the needle beautifully - hallucinatory dream sequences, beautiful pixel art, and compelling poetry, punctuated with some genuinely effective jump scares. This scratched an itch I didn't know I had!

The general premise: you are Elster, an android unit previously paired with a human partner. You find yourself stranded on an alien planet and go off in search of your ship's pilot (and your human partner). You quickly discover an abandoned mining station where the humans all appear to be dead and the androids have all either gone insane or turned into monsters. You have to descend to the bottom of the mine to unravel the mysteries of your and your partner's identities and the source of the increasingly fleshy horrors appearing in the mine.

The game does an excellent job of building a sense of the world these characters you live in, mostly discovered through notes and item descriptions: a dystopian techno-fascist space empire where people and their android counterparts are more bred than born. I love a game (or any form of media, really), where the creators have clearly deeply fleshed out this world in a design document, but don't force-feed that lore to the player. The world feels lived-in without making me feel like I'm reading a campaign module.

Gameplay-wise, it's standard survival horror fare: you can only hold six items at a time, and most of the gameplay is a mix of puzzle-solving and fetch quests. There's the occasional shootout, but ammo and health are constantly in short supply. As someone who often finds this type of gameplay tedious, they do a nice job of switching things up enough (and making you constantly fear for your life enough) that you don't get bored.

I haven't beaten the game yet, but so far: 10/10, no notes, I love my robot space lesbians.

2) Mushroom Coffee

If you're the type of millenial who has aged into tummy problems, you've probably seen ads for mushroom coffee. It's a blend of various healthy shrooms with about as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee. I've been trying different brands out for a while - I started with Instagram-omnipresent Ryze before switching to Atlas Coffee Club at the recommendation of Bon Appetit. Atlas is definitely more coffee-like than Ryze, which tasted like weak mushroom juice.

This is the latest in a long line of Weird Things I Consume, and if you're a coffee person you probably won't be converted, but I've been looking for a caffeine source that doesn't upset my stomach or give me jitters and so far I've been pleasantly surprised by mushroom coffee. The alleged health benefits are probably bunk, but it's also probably not worse for you than coffee, and it's definitely been better on my stomach and my nerves. 7/10, hopefully this doesn't turn out to be 50% lead in five years.