Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem is best known for his 1961 novel Solaris, which was adapted a decade later for the screen by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film would go on to be widely heralded as a classic of the medium, but Lem criticized Tarkovsky’s focus on human relationships over the technical detail and theorizing of the source material. The author’s work, then, is a particularly odd fit for a video game, as the medium often prioritizes action and instant gratification above all else. But with their adaptation of Lem’s 1964 novel The Invincible, Krakow-based developer Starward Industries very nearly succeeds at translating Lem’s work to gaming without losing sight of its density of ideas.
As a sly way of incorporating long stretches of sci-fi description, the game models itself on the back-and-forth radio conversations of Firewatch. The player character, a biologist named Yasna, is sent to the surface of the uninhabited planet Regis III to search for her missing research team. As she searches, she’s in constant contact with her superior, Astrogator Novik, who directs Yasna while serving as a sounding board for her findings and theories. From the game’s first-person viewpoint, looking at certain objects shows the symbol of a dialogue balloon to signify when Yasna can report her observations, so players have to essentially point and click to initiate conversations while traveling through the game’s alien landscape.
Among arid cliffs beneath a stark turquoise sky, Yasna notes the beautiful planet’s bizarre emptiness. By the research team’s calculations, Regis III’s landmasses should be teeming with life. Instead, she can find only arcane metalwork and metallic flowers while she trudges through areas like deep caves and a rocky expanse shrouded in greenish mist. The mystery of the planet’s barren ecosystem is eerie and entrancing, particularly when Yasna must make use of handsome retro futuristic technology to proceed. She uses a chunky detector with a green display to view networks of underground metal roots, and when she retrieves recordings from a probe, they take the form of translucent slides like the kind placed on an overhead projector.
Many of these moments are concentrated in the game’s strong first half. As The Invincible continues, though, the environments grow similar and the new technology grows fewer, with a greater emphasis placed on driving around in a rover. Even Yasna’s findings become more hands-off, as she draws conclusions from flashbacks, found research material, and unspoken thought processes rather than from any of the devices that players use throughout.
The game makes frequent use of first-person animations where we see Yasna’s spacesuited hands pressing buttons and turning dials. But without a strong link between the actions that we perform and the dialogue being spoken, players may begin to feel as if they’re outside of the character. Combine that with the length of certain dialogue scenes and The Invincible sometimes plays more like an elaborate wrapper for a podcast.
Once we stop sharing in Yasna’s discoveries, the storytelling never quite clicks. Apart from a few stiff flashbacks, players simply don’t get to know enough about Yasna’s fellow researchers to get invested in how their fate drives her search for answers. Yasna’s quest feels detached rather than desperate, with all the game’s themes coldly laid out in dialogue choices. The Invincible does remain reasonably engrossing through to the end, but it never recaptures the interactive vigor of its first half, eventually becoming a bout of scientific calculus on autopilot.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Evolve PR.
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