Indie Game of the Week 486: The Invincible

The collection of Indie games chosen for this feature last year had an unusual throughline by way of some linear first-person adventure games based on space exploration, starting with Return to Grace (#404) and passing through Mouthwashing (#427), The Station (#429), Deliver Us the Moon (#433), and Routine (#450). In each case, though the mechanics may have differed, they played around with themes like the lonely nature of space travel, the way the endless void plays on the mind during the long stints away from terra firma, and usually something insightful about the human condition and the way it reacts to crises and the unknown (and that space travel provides plenty of both). I'm belatedly picking up that thread again with Starward Industries's The Invincible, a game based on the story of the same name, first serialized in a magazine then later published as a book in 1964, by Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem. Lem is probably better known for Solaris, which saw a couple of renowned movie adaptations, and The Invincible is a later story that covered similar themes of the nature of unknowable alien life, to the extent that we wouldn't even recognize it as such without some effort, and how humanity is often its own worst enemy and its own biggest detriment to seeking scientific enlightenment from interstellar exploration.

This isn't quite the same as a Star Trek tricorder but if it was it'd be picking up sand, sand, and more sand.

The Invincible, the game at least (the stories are not quite 1:1; if anything, the game version is a prequel), follows a team of research scientists that belong to "The Commonwealth" (no nationalities are ever named) touching down on the largely barren planet of Regis III. Only its astrogator and team leader, Novik, knows for sure why they made this detour as part of their research mission but it becomes clear that something planetside is amiss when the team goes missing and only the team's resident astrobiologist, Dr. Yasna, is left to broadcast her condition to Novik on board their ship The Dragonfly; all four other members are missing and incommunicado. Suffering from amnesia herself, Yasna is eventually able to navigate across Regis III and its recurring sandstorms to meet up with her crewmates, only to find them insensate and surrounded by odd metallic structures that imply some manner of alien life once inhabited the planet millions of years prior. The mysteries continue to deepen as Yasna investigates further only to run into a hitch when the presence of the Commonwealth's mortal enemies, the Alliance (again, no countries are attached to this group; almost like manmade geographical demarcations don't truly matter on an astral scale), becomes known.

The game has a very gradual approach to its progression, allowing the player plenty of moments to soak in the atmosphere of its incredible visuals—a combination of a beautifully strange alien desert world and the retro-futuristic imagining of what might've been had the '60s American-Soviet space race continued indefinitely—and its intelligent story of scientific human endeavor marred by nationalistic pride concerning getting one over on an enemy coalition and our own limited understanding of what constitutes life as the planet's mysteries are gradually uncovered. Gameplay typically revolves around some basic physical interactions with the environment or the game's retro-future technology, frequently using Yasna's journal maps for directions, her binoculars for reconnaissance, and her scanner for finding underground metallic deposits and other useful environmental information otherwise invisible to the human eye. The story has several branches, though the player's choice of dialogue prompts very rarely has any direct influence on the narrative; rather, they exist to give players some agency over the development of the character of Yasna, including her compassion for others and her curiosity about the planet's unusual properties. It's very much in the same vein of those games that have derisively been dubbed walking simulators (though you do drive around in a rover a lot too), where most of its simple interactive elements exist to prop up the story being told. I certainly don't have an issue with that form of narrative delivery though; especially when the game is this vivid and immersive in the telling.

The game tracks the story so far with this selection of comic book panels. Given there's several flashbacks, it also helps organize the timeline of events.

If you've seen either Solaris movie (or read the book, even) then you probably have a firm idea of whether or not the pace of a story like this is something you have the patience to see through. My playthrough clocked in at just shy of seven hours and it felt like a lot of that involved clambering over alien mesas and discussing evolutionary biology with an unseen voice over the radio; there were some notable incidents, including walking over the precarious skeleton of a crumbling metallic superstructure that may have once been some kind of large-scale supercomputer or the bones of an enormous non-carbon-based lifeform, and a sequence where you retrace the steps of an Alliance research convoy, marking off where various machines, vehicles, and personnel ended up using a checklist found earlier; like that one incidental side-quest of sorts from Prey (with which this game shares several aesthetic qualities). As I've said before, though, I embrace all manner of adventure game variants as a lover of video game stories and even a slower format like this still has plenty to offer, not least of which the aforementioned immersion factor as you tumble over cliffs or inconveniently black out due to whatever lasting brain damage caused the early game's amnesia. The ambient music, too, does an excellent job of drawing you into to a very specific era of the hard science fiction of the '60s and '70s.

The Invincible is a game that's going to require some degree of investment—not in a skill sense but more in a "oh, I should be paying attention to all of this" sense—and truthfully it can be a bit too straightforward with its directives at times with little room for player expression beyond the frequent dialogue multiple choice prompts. It is, after all, sticking to the themes and tone of a very well-regarded novel, as famous in its (and the developers') homeland as Andrzej Sapkowski's tales of Geralt of Rivia, so I can appreciate that there's a semi-cautious veneration involved. If you're a fan of science-fiction that stops to smell the metallic roses occasionally and does not speak down to its audience of fellow STEM nerds, The Invincible's the type of gorgeously presented "thinky" yarn that might appeal to book reader types whom typically avoid games with too many skill-based challenges to overcome. If you're instead predisposed to find games of this genre interminable I'm not sure this will be the one to win you over. As for me, any game that makes me feel like I wandered into a random episode of Star Trek (the original series) is golden in my book.

Sometimes you want to communicate with alien life, making first contact and those important first steps towards true mutual understanding. Other times you just want to nuke everything instead. Hey, gotta nuke something.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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