Silent Hill meets 90s anime in Signal Veil, where a missing mother’s phone is the only weapon

Survival horror has always been a genre about scarcity of sight. The fixed cameras of early Resident Evil hid as much as they showed, and Silent Hill turned a single tool, a pocket radio that hissed when something was close, into the player’s whole nervous system. Signal Veil, the new project from Chilean independent studio Time Hunters and Tokyo horror publisher Serafini Productions, takes that radio, folds it into a schoolgirl’s flip phone, and paints the whole thing in the grainy palette of the late-night horror anime that aired in the nineties.

The premise is built on an inheritance. Aki Mizuno is a teenager whose mother disappears without a trace, leaving behind an old cellphone that reacts to spirits nobody else can see. When students at Nishikawa High School start vanishing too, the phone becomes the only instrument Aki has to read the building: it vibrates, crackles with static or distorts when something is near. Its flash stuns, its camera exposes hidden objects and imprints, and the studio says it can even be used to parry.

A red flip phone screen reveals a hidden spirit clinging to a schoolgirl in a dim school locker room — Image: Serafini Productions / Time Hunters

That is the creative idea worth following. Where most horror games hand the player a gun and then ration the bullets, Signal Veil makes perception the weapon. Enemies are not simply shot down; the announcement describes a ritual sequence of detecting a spirit, provoking it, stunning it, exposing its essence and only then purging it for good. Ammunition, medicine and mystical weapons are scarce, so every encounter is framed as a problem to observe before it is a fight to win, and each entity is meant to behave differently enough to demand its own reading.

Layered over that is a sanity system, a mechanic the genre has flirted with since Eternal Darkness. As Aki’s mind frays, the school itself warps, enemies grow less predictable and her own combat becomes more desperate. The release positions the story as psychological rather than gory, a past buried under false memories and silence, with the spirits themselves described as born from trauma.

A hand-drawn anime-style frame of a schoolgirl as a dark spirit bursts from her hair beside a chain-link fence — Image: Serafini Productions / Time Hunters

The visual references are explicit. Alongside Resident Evil and Silent Hill, the developers cite psychological horror anime such as Another and Jujutsu Kaisen, and the screenshots lean into hand-drawn faces, harsh red emergency lighting and a film grain that recalls a VHS tape left too long in the deck. The camera returns to preset angles, the classic grammar that turns every corridor corner into a held breath.

For Serafini Productions, founded in Tokyo in 2022, it is a natural extension of its BrokenLore series, an interconnected run of psychological horror games about fear, trauma and contemporary social anxieties. Signal Veil sits outside that series, pairing the publisher’s taste for trauma-driven horror with an independent studio working from Chile.

The game is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC, where it will be sold through Steam and the Epic Games Store. It was announced on October 2 with a first trailer, there is no release date yet, and players can already add it to their wishlists on Steam, the PlayStation Store and the Epic Games Store.

Tags: Resident Evil, Serafini Productions, Silent Hill, Signal Veil, survival horror games, Time Hunters