Serial Experiments Lain Spinoff Game //signal. Announced

Developer Team MJM has announced //signal., a new “occultic RPG” that’s an official authorized spinoff game of the Serial Experiments Lain anime series. The game will launch on Steam and itch.io for PC and macOS on April 30 for 1,00 yen, or roughly $7.

//signal. is made possible through guidelines published by NBCUniversal Entertainment for residents in Japan, allowing developers to make derivative works of the Serial Experiments Lain anime. Serial Experiments Lain’s scriptwriter Chiaki J. Konaka sent the game’s staff a letter which basically served as his blessing for the project. 

//signal. lets players interact with characters from the anime and explore “a new facet” of Lain Iwakura and the series itself. Players can progress by compiling emails and event logs from the past to “piece together broken bonds again.” 

The Serial Experiments Lain anime ran for 13 episodes from July to September 1998. Ryūtarō Nakamura was the anime’s director, Chiaki J. Konaka was the script writer, and Yoshitoshi Abe (stylized as yoshitoshi ABe) was the character designer.

Serial Experiments Lain was licensed to Funimation from Geneon in 2010, and it was released on home video in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Crunchyroll began to stream the anime series in 2017, but it removed from the streaming service in 2018.

Lastly, here’s an overview of the anime, via its Crunchyroll listing:

Acclaimed artist Yoshitoshi ABe (Haibane Renmei, Texhnolyze) brings to life the existential classic that paved the way for blockbuster films such as The Matrix. Follow along as fourteen year old Lain—driven by the abrupt suicide of a classmate—logs on to the Wired and promptly looses herself in a twisted mass of hallucinations, memories, and interconnected-psyches.