The greatest compliment I can give the developers of The Invincible is that this feels like walking into the worlds imagined by mid-century sci-fi authors. Based on the novel The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem, I spent an hour with a development build of Starward Industries’ upcoming sci-fi adventure and fell into a vibrant wonderland rife with adventure, danger, and discovery.
I took control of Yasna, a crewmember from the ship Invincible trying to find out what happened to some prior explorers on a remote, desolate planet. I wandered through the branches of a mountain pass, finding dead, lost crewmates in narrow ravines and twisting passages. Her slow, plodding space-suited bootsteps and labored breathing as she climbed rocks and dealt with an increasingly bad headache added a sense of depth and feeling to the world around her.
She frequently talks with her navigator, Novik, a crewmember on the orbiting Invincible that lets her know about what’s going on and helps make decisions about their course. The steady conversation between the two provides backdrop to the desolate canyon environments, and branching dialogue choices offer up some customization in how Yasna reacts to the events around her. There’s also a clear conflict between their personalities, adding a bit of dramatic fuel to the chatter.
Branching dialogue choices offer up some customization in how Yasna reacts to the events around her.
The gameplay is otherwise the kind of fare you expect from a first-person adventure game. I picked paths, interacted with objects, and generally watched pretty animations happen. Some segments have you use tools, like a homing tracker that finds space suit radios, a scanner that x-rays walls, or a handheld telescope. All of those were available at all times and worked in nicely intuitive ways.
I was especially satisfied when I discovered that the telescope could be used to identify and check off things on the to-do list from a distance. Part of my job was to catalog the fate of individual vehicles and crew, so just spotting and checking off a vehicle’s serial number from a distance felt great. Something a real expeditionary would do.
The Invincible had a more meditative pace than more action focused games or first-person horror titles, though. Much of that’s down to Yasna, a biologist by trade, whose natural curiosity gets the better of her fairly often: She’s willing to put up with a lot, or pause when others would keep moving, in order to figure out how some strange new alien thing works.
To be fair to her, who wouldn’t get kind of excited at giant metal flowers growing giant metal fruit?
I grew up reading a lot of old sci-fi, and The Invincible scratched that itch in superb ways. It’s got vehicles with clicky switches and buttons, knobs to turn, and odd twisting locking mechanisms on the doors. The retro-futuristic interfaces of the equipment are well balanced against a rugged, lived-in look for what is clearly hard-wearing frontier tech.
The Invincible scratched that old-sci-fi itch in superb ways.
The design was great. Tweaking knobs and turning keys to crack open data units, then downloading the recorded radio logs or removing physically printed pictures from a robot’s camera recorder is awesome. Small details kicked in too: When listening to a rover log, the rover’s built-in radar system replayed the events surrounding it at that time. Ominously moving pings added to the sense of tension and wonder—that spoke promisingly to the kind of detail that a good adventure game must have to keep you engaged.
The demo I played used more dramatic effects sparingly, but very effectively. A setpiece moment had an antimatter cannon fired, complete with rippling effects and stupendous lighting decisions not just in the moment of action, but in the glowing red-hot rock afterwards. A large and powerful force-field left melted slopes of rock behind where it bisected cliffsides.
All that techy stuff in The Invincible is going to benefit a lot from beefy PCs and top-tier consoles, because the preview was as much about spectacle and delight as it was about exploring and cataloging. I loved taking my time with what was around, enjoying the set piece environments and gazing at the rugged red cliffsides and distant skylines.
People who enjoyed recent first-person space adventures like Deliver Us The Moon or Moons of Madness should have The Invincible firmly pinned in their calendar. It’s the kind of catnip you’re looking for.
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