It’s the same old, same old story. You wake up on an alien planet with no idea how you came to be there, no idea where you are, only the vaguest idea of who YOU are, your radio doesn’t work, and all you have to go on is a map that shows the way to a “camp”. You head out through the desolate landscape hoping your oxygen holds out long enough for you to find the answers. Thus starts “The Invincible”, an adventure game set in Stanislaw Lem’s novella of the same name.
I’ve never read “The Invincible”, so I came into this game blind. I do remember this game coming out a few years back; I’d watched the trailer and was intrigued by the silence and mystery of the game. That’s rare; so many games these days want to dive right into the action, keep you constantly pressing buttons. There’s only one action bit in “The Invincible” (two if you count the hidden “Pong” minigame). Most of the time you’re alone, occasionally talking with Astrogator Novik, the mission commander stuck in orbit with the ship due to a broken leg.
As an adventure game, you are mostly observing, exploring, trying to piece together your past as your memories slowly return, and making choices. There’s hundreds of choices to make in the game that come to affect how much you know and find out about how you came to be here, how your shipmates came to be here, what happened to the earlier expedition by an enemy faction, and what sort of life inhabits the quiet seas and dead cities left by a long-extinct civilization.
As you go about your adventure, your memories, conversations, discoveries and found records combine to form a comic-book style journal of your particular playthrough. New chapters can appear before or after the current ones, and most every decision gets at least a new panel in the comic.
The game itself takes place from a first-person perspective; you only ever see yourself in the comic or occasionally by reviewing pictures taken of you by probe droids or other machines. The original novella was written in 1960, and so the game leans into the retro-futuristic space age vibe. The colors are faded and desaturated, the landscapes look like old SF novel covers, the devices look handcrafted from bits of metal and wire; the computers are old and clunky; and machines take slides that you can look through.
Unlike similar adventure games like Firewatch or Gone Home, there is the possibility to meet and interact with other characters… if you make the correct decisions. There’s eleven main endings and, I believe, there’s at least a couple of endings that end the game early (but I was always taking the choices that led to me doing more exploring instead of returning to the IC Dragonfly and leaving the planet).
Like those other games, though, The Invincible has a story to tell and it tells it in just a couple of hours. I believe I got one of the better endings. I went and watched the eleven main endings on YouTube and found out I didn’t get what I would have considered the best ending, but I also know that I couldn’t have got it due to some decision I made along the lines. It was never an option.
It’s not the kind of game that needs a walkthrough. It’s a slow, contemplative game that turns, at times, deeply philosophical. SF-nal tropes that seem commonplace today were still new when the novella was written, and the game honors them as Yasna and Novik work through the implications of their discoveries.
The Invincible is an adventure game developed by the Polish game developers Starward Industries and published by 11 Bit Studios, formed in part by ex-CD Projekt (The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077) developers. 11 Bit is perhaps better known for their games Frostpunk, This War of Mine and the recent The Alters, where a lone scientist has to make clones of himself to survive. This is Starward’s first game, with a single player extraction shooter Into the Fire coming out later this year.
There is something amazing about Polish game studios. Their games just feel different in a way I can’t describe. I haven’t played a game from any one of them that didn’t leave some sort of impression, and The Invincible is no exception. It’s a gripping story told at a pace that lets it breathe, but still is short enough to be completed in a few hours. I got it for “free” as part of my PlayStation Plus subscription, but it is currently 60% off on Steam as part of their Spring Sale. The Steam DLC includes additional customizations to your helmet and rover, as well as concept art and, I believe, the full comic book that perhaps covers all the plot points I missed on my playthrough. There doesn’t seem to be any DLC for the PS5 version.
Based on my enjoyment of The Invincible, I’ll be playing Into the Fire as soon as it hits early access.
