A small studio made a game based on a Stanislaw Lem's novel | Hacker News Reader

A small studio made a game based on a Stanislaw Lem's novel

invinciblethegame.com

108 pointsmgl35 comments

This is such a beautiful game that really channels the book. The Soviet retro futurism in the art style really sells it and the bleak mystery behind it makes you think in the best "classic scifi" way.

I loved my time with this.

Yeah, from the trailer at least the canyons exactly mirrored my image of the book. It's actually eerie how close the whole world and tech looks to how I pictured them.

Kind of off-topic, but I always find it weird to see people's hands and arms in first person games like this. Like, if I think about it, I know my hands are almost always in view, but they almost always fade away and I ignore them.

Whereas whenever I see a first person game, it's almost all I can focus on and it breaks the illusion.

Does it bother you more knowing many FPS are just a pair of disembodied floating 3D arms noodling across the landscape?

Best not think about it too much... lol =3

I still remember the awful Trespasser, which was rightfully called an "arm simulator". You were supposed to be some adventurer gal, bur in reality you were a disembodied arm. Terrible controls, too!

"Mistakes were made" in Trespasser

Shovelware is arguably an industry tradition... the prettier the box art... the more suspect quality of the game... =3

Title should really say which novel. The man wrote quite a few of them.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Stanis%C5%82a...

I thought it would be based on the novel of the same name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible

Something that you'll only learn after clicking the link, hence the need to update the title.

Seems like a heavy handed edit, I can see the destination URL in parentheses and it's a dead giveaway before clicking or hovering over the link

And it is honestly incredible. The Invincible is my favourite book of all time, and I remember thinking as a 14 year old whether someone could make a game out of it - and concluding that no, there's not enough "action" to make an interesting video game around the story. Boy, was I wrong - the game not only portrays the setting perfectly, the necessary creative liberties it takes to engage the player are "worth it" and I can only imagine S. Lem would have agreed to them(well, other than one of the endings....but it can't be perfect I guess).

I'd write a lot about what I enjoyed, but nearly all of it would be spoilers. Go, play the game - or better yet, read the book, it has recently received a modern English translation, much better than the previous English-translated-from-German-Translated-from-Polish edition. And there is a fantastic audiobook on audible.

> And there is a fantastic audiobook on audible.

Unfortunately it seems like the audiobook has been pulled from Audible! (Unless I'm just searching for it incorrectly?) I saw this book recommended in another thread and have been checking over the last several months in hopes that it has been restored, but no luck yet. Tempted to just buy it from another platform.

Oh no! You're right - I just checked and luckily it's still in my Audible library, but indeed, searching for it on the store yields nothing :-(

I see it's available for sale here at least:

https://www.audioeditions.com/the-invincible?sp=378507

How bizzare, I expect this from streaming services, but I suppose I never considered Audiobook distribution "gatekeeping"... Delisting from Audible must be a massive hit to any audiobook's sales numbers

Heads up, the game's EULA[1] has some objectionable terms. They collect your story decisions and system information ("technical requirements of User's hardware and software"). There's also an indemnity clause (though not the worst I've seen). Can't anyone anywhere just let us have nice things?

For those wondering, it should work on Windows 7 with the -dx11 switch.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/eula/731040_eula_0

Can’t really see anything objectionable there… it’s a video game, they want to log game events and user config to reproduce errors, nothing new or concerning really.

it’s a video game, they want to log

Videogames worked fine for decades without phoning home.

But it does help enormously, just like many things we didn't have for decades.

and now a lot of them don't

They also worked "fine" for decades releasing once and not expecting months/years of free patches.

Even if they aren't GaaS, old school single players games took in some parts of SaaS maintaining.

This seems quite reasonable imo

It's pretty normal to do both those things in order to reflect on game design, monitor quality, and provide support.

We don't have to like that it's the norm now, but it's a bummer to see a small studio singled out for something the whole industry is doing, especially when their game is being shared as something especially interesting

Great book. Great game. I treasured the time I spent reading it and playing it. Head's up: the game does not follow the same characters as the book. It's sort of a different story that's taking place at the same time and very nearby.

Today I learned that the "walking simulation" genre exists in gaming.

Gaming is literally the industry that coined the term.

Not everything everywhere is for us https://youtu.be/UA8DFsJg9Tc

The graphics style gives some Fallout vibes, in a good way. Beautiful!

Poland,the baltucs and chechia are by now the powerhouse in europe when it comes to games and software.

while watching the trailer, I had a deja vue from the bioshock 1 atmosphere which I recommend very much

Indeed. Bioshock 1 remains my favourite game - even after all these years, the parallels in the story between Rapture and our modern world remain as relevant as ever.

> Not everything everywhere is for us

Lies! the stars are mankind's birthright!

Death to the xeno!

I call The Invincible a glorious failure in my review: https://mssv.net/2023/12/26/the-invincible/

tl,dr: It looks incredible, like no other game you'll see today, and it grapples with deeply interesting themes – but it's extremely annoying to play and suffers from a serious lack of editing. There's just too much friction to become truly immersed. Still, other games can only wish their failures were this daring.

Out of curiosity - did you read the book before playing the game?

I'm asking because as I said in my comment - I really loved the game, but I do wonder if knowing the secret of Regis, The Invincible and its sister ship made it easier to play and overlook some of the mechanical problems(which in my opinion really weren't that much of a deal, I think I got lost driving the rover once but like, meh).

I didn't, no. I've read a lot of Stanislaw Lem but The Invincible never quite hit my radar. I can see how knowing the story would've made it a bit easier to get on with, though.

You may want to check it again with the Voyager update released in May with 88% positive reviews on steam :)

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