For reasons unclear to you and with grim possibilities ahead, you find yourself waking up on a stark alien world. You have no recollection of how you arrived here, lying in the dust with no clear landmarks, and, scrambling about for your gear, you realize your faulty memory isn’t the only thing that makes no sense: you and your crew were never meant to be here.
That crew is scattered and unresponsive, and your lone point of contact with humanity is a voice in your ear no better informed than yourself. Every small scrap of revelation only opens the further possibility of mystery.
There’s a very real possibility that you’re not alone on this planet.
It’s a killer opening to a game, one that instantly engages the player. In Starward Industries’ The Invincible, you are thrust into an automatically tense, dreadful atmosphere – you are, after all, on an inhospitable alien world, where any small mistake could spell your death. Massive landmarks tower in the distance and loom in the immediate surroundings as you crawl through ancient canyons that stagger your perspective. Your character moves slowly, both under the weight of her life-sustaining suit and the understanding of her fragility; any tumble due to treacherous footing could spell her downfall. Anything could tear a suit, could kill her.
This isn’t, however, a survival sim — this barren world is not full of teeth-clenching resource conservation, and there is no ticking clock. It’s not an action game — there are no monsters, no platforming, no steep learning curve of skill. Despite its first-person framing, this isn’t a shooter; it falls comfortably into the more literarily minded ‘walking sim’ genre, and for good reason: The Invincible is based on the 1964 Stanislaw Lem novel of the same name. As such, this is retro-futuristic hard sci-fi. It, like that genre, takes itself very, very seriously. This game has an artistic purpose, a sort of intellectual mission statement.
You aren’t here to play, you’re here to think. Not hard, however. There are no puzzles — nothing you, the player, need to figure out. You aren’t looking to explore, either – the narrative path is signposted for you.
So maybe you aren’t here to think so much as listen.
The Invincible takes itself so seriously, is so singularly certain of its goals, that it takes nearly any sense of autonomy from the player. It tells you to pay attention by the sheer act of not allowing you to do anything otherwise. Certainly, then, what it seeks to tell you is something important, something philosophically eye-opening or conceptually challenging.
Sadly, this isn’t the case. The hard sci-fi concepts being hewn from the play experience are, after all, sixty years old, conceived of by an intelligent writer pondering about possibilities of technology that have now become old hat. Without giving anything away, the central crisis of our characters falls along the lines of technology gone wrong – but not our technology, nor any technology for which we – as a player or as a character – have any clear culpability. Our technology, with which the game allows us to play, is hyper-stylized and happily old: whirring computational tape and clunky photographic slides, punchy old stereo buttons and flashing lights.
What we’re meant to be pondering on is alien, out of our hands, and implied to be so far beyond our grasp that our character struggles to find words – but is something which the player might sum up in fewer words than I’m spending on this review.
The ponderous nature of the narrative tragically infiltrates the rest of the game’s mechanics, making all things –interacting with objects, using that technology, making sense of direction – tediously slow. In the late game when different paths are tantalizingly teased, the player may be too tired to engage with them, discouraged by the very thought that a dead end may lead to laborious back-tracking.
There have been some truly stellar walking sims in recent years without an iota of this dynamic style; these games take place in old houses, walking through forests, and poking around old hotels. It’s a genre that thrives in the mundane. One would hope that adding novelty would only compound the possibilities for narrative impact. Frustratingly, the potential horror of inhospitable space does little to make The Invincible stand out in a genre filled with much more intimate, personal perils. The killer opening leaves for a pretty average ending.
While compelling, thought-provoking, and inspired, The Invincible isn’t exactly fun.
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