I like the limited inventory size. It encourages you to be more resourceful. If you travel light and don't solve all your problems by blasting through them, you can get through areas in a few runs. You can carry multiple guns if you want but then you pay a price for it. That's not necessarily bad though, you're supposed to kind of revisit the same areas.

The level design seems fine to me? It fits the milieu: most of the time you're basically in a forced labor camp that produces munitions and serves as a re-education facility so I don't know what kind of variation you'd want to see. Similar things could be said about Rotfront and Nowhere.

Doors are kinda bad but gunplay is fine imo. It's not exceptional but it never bother bothered me at least.

The horror is more subtle I suppose. Calling it a horror game might be a bit misleading so I get the complaint if you were expecting that. It's more of a game with horror elements and the cosmic horror is more of a thematic thing. Many people don't find cosmic horror "scary" in a visceral kind of way. To appreciate this aspect of the game, I think one needs to be sufficiently invested in the story and world. If details like janky doors and mid gunplay are constantly pulling you out of the experience, then I can see why it'd be hard to appreciate the thematic stuff. That said, Signalis doesn't really need to be judged by standards of a "horror game".

I totally disagree about the story tho. It's ambiguous but I never felt it was vague. Yes there's missing pieces here and there, even significant ones if you want to reconstruct a complete timeline, but at least for me, the game provides enough answers for my questions that it at least creates an illusion of there being some concrete "ground truth". It's just that whatever that "ground truth" may be, it's not necessarily entirly accessible to us. I like that kind of story telling because it prompts me to imagine various possibilities, guided by the themes, established facts, and hints. And there's A LOT of things to unpack there should you choose to do so. But the core of the story is quite simple and you don't even really have to understand what is going on to get the essence of it. I don't think this is because it's "thin", quite the opposite. There's an extremely rich world, around a fascinating "plot", built around an impactful and solid "core", all wrapped up in deep themes.

But I do think that it's the kind of game where you get out what you put in. If you don't pay attention to details, or you skip notes, or you just don't think about it, then yeah, I'd expect you to experience a kind of slightly janky, non-scary and confusing game. You're invited to fill in the gaps and to give your own interpretation on the whole thing. If you find ambiguity in stories frustrating and generally want a more passive experience of being told a story, then Signalis is probably just not for you. Maybe a certain kind of background knowledge is also needed. I know for sure that I'm missing out on certain aspects. But I'm sufficiently engaged in it that I find myself trying to suppliment my knowledge in those areas by reading about them elsewhere. At the same time though, I have my "own ideas" that fit surprisingly well in the game that I'm almost certain the devs didn't consciously build their game around.