Saturday Morning Gaming: The Invincible (based on the story by Stanislaw Lem)

My buddy called me up and said “Jaybird! Come over! Spend the night! We’ll cook and we’ll play The Invincible!”

“Sounds good!”

So I made sure that Maribou had what she needed and the kitties had what they needed and I packed up my stuff and went over and he asked me if I knew about Stanisław Lem. Apparently, I failed every part of the test. I never read the guy in the 80’s or 90’s. I never saw Solaris (in my defense, I thought it was a George Clooney love story). So he broke down the basics for me:

Stanisław Lem was a Polish writer of hard sci-fi during the Cold War. He tended to have an emphasis on how alien “aliens” were likely to be. Being unable to overcome the distance between not only different cultures, but different biologies. The game that we were going to play, The Invincible, is based on a story that Lem wrote in 1964 and it wasn’t translated into English until almost a decade later.

We busted out the wikipedia and found that Phillip K. Dick didn’t think that Lem was really the author of his short stories. Dick thought that “Lem” was a composite committee put together by the communists to create art that would direct public opinion. Huh. It makes sense when you think about it. But, as it turns out, PKD was probably wrong about that.

We hammered out that I knew nothing about this guy, that he wrote during the height of the Cold War, and that I would be walking into The Invincible blind.

So we booted it up.

The first thing I want to tell you is that this isn’t really a *GAME* game. It’s a walking simulator, mostly. The gameplay consists of walking around and interacting, slowly and deliberately, with the environment. Like, you put your controller over a button or door and Press X to press the button/open the door. You’re not going to be ducking and weaving. You’re not going to be shooting. You’re mostly going to be walking around and having conversations over your helmet’s wireless communications device.

So if you think “Oh, my skillz are no longer sufficient for modern video games”, this game is definitely going to be your speed.

Additionally, if you’re thinking “Oh, a science-fiction game! I’m going to run around shooting things!”, no. You’re not. The game is tense and there are some really good scenes where you wonder if it’s not a horror game instead of a sci-fi thriller (don’t worry too much… it’s not a horror game). But if you’re hoping for exciting gameplay, you’re going to be disappointed.

Okay. With all of that behind us, how is the game? The game is awesome. It’s entirely story-driven. I went into the game not knowing anything about it and as the story unfolded, it gave tons of hard sci-fi stuff to chew on.

Here, check out the launch trailer:

You are Yasna. A biologist on a team of scientists from… well, not the Soviet bloc. But, like, allied with the Soviet bloc.

The game starts with everybody being awakened from their cryosleep pods and you’re in orbit around Regis III, a planet that is definitely in the “sweet spot” with liquid water and breathable (by humans) atmosphere (well, for at least an hour, anyway) but appears to be without life at all. It’s your crew’s job to go down there and survey the planet. But not you… what need is there for a biologist on a lifeless planet? And then… you wake up on the planet itself. Lying on the ground. Where’s your pack? You try to hail some of your crewmates on your helmet wireless communication device but it appears to be out. And you can’t remember what happened. What the heck happened?

And, from there, the game takes off. You have to figure out where you are, where you’re going, and what happened to the rest of your crew on this alien planet. Then you get to find out the various secrets of Regis III… including finding out what the Capitalists are doing there.

You’ve got a bunch of tools in your kit that will help. I believe that the official genre is “atompunk”. Everything is analog. You’ve got a telescope, a scanner, and a proximity meter. Your spacesuit is covered with little analog gauges giving readings of oxygen levels and heart rate. When you need to set up an antenna, it’s a “futuristic” sparkly UHF antenna. It’s a very old vision of the future and if you enjoy that sort of thing (as I do), you will be positively bathing in it. For example, there are scenes with different “futuristic” vehicles, robots, and spaceships… and they all look like the painted covers of 1960’s and 1970’s pulp paperbacks.

When it comes to choices, well… there are a lot of conversations that you’ll be having in the game and the overwhelming majority of them are obvious “illusion of choice” conversations. Like, let’s say that you get asked to do something. Your responses might be:

1. I will do it.
2. I have some questions first.
3. I am nervous about doing it.

And, no matter which option you pick, your next line of dialog will be something like “Okay, I’ll do it… but are we sure it’s safe?”

And then you go on to do what you were asked to do. Now, there are a couple of choices in the game (and they’re pretty obvious) where there is a real option between Doing Something and Doing Something Else. They’re toward the end, though… which tells me that there isn’t a whole lot of replay value in the game. That said, the one time I played through the story had my jaw on the floor. It’s a really good story.

If you want a really good story and deliberate, non-demanding gameplay, you need to pick The Invincible.

And, apparently, the next time I go over there to spend the night, we’ll be watching Solaris.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is The Invincible’s box art.)