An indie studio created a game based on Stanislaw Lem's novel
invinciblethegame.com
invinciblethegame.com
Its a walking simulator for the most part. (For those that know what that means) Think of it as a journey you take part it. But there are a few choices you can make to change a bit of who dies, and a affect a slight change in the ending.
I enjoyed it thorougly. And felt it was a great representation of the retrofuturistic world the book presented, and stayed mostly in the style of that era.
Suggesting that your choices will impact who dies in the game is about as much a spoiler as knowing you shoot guns in Call of Duty.
Frankly, if you don't want to risk reading spoilers, don't engage in conversations about the medium at risk of being spoiled for you.
> In principle it was not used on the surface of a planet, and the truth was that the Invincible had never once mobilized its Cyclops. Situations that called for such an eventuality, even on a scale of the entire tonnage of the space base, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the jargon used on board, sending out the Cyclops for some task meant the same certainty as entrusting it to the Devil himself. No one had ever heard of any Cyclops failing.
> the black scrub on the slopes began to smoke and set off in waves toward the vehicle from Earth, coming on with such vehemence that in the first instant the Cyclops disappeared completely, concealed by what looked like a cape of tarry smoke flung from above. At once, however, a ragged flash lit up the entire breadth of the attacking cloud. This was not the Cyclops using its terrible weaponry, merely the cloud’s energy fields striking against the force field.
> Out of the corner of his eye, Rohan saw the commander open his mouth to ask the Chief Engineer standing next to him if the field would hold out—but the words didn’t come. He didn’t have time.
> The black whirlwind, the walls of the ravine, the bushes—all of it disappeared in a split second. It looked as if a volcano breathing fire had opened up in a fissure in the rock. A column of smoke and frothing lava, shattered rocks, and finally, immense white billows of steam that probably came from the boiling waters of the stream, soared a mile into the air to where the TV relay was hovering. The Cyclops had activated its antimatter cannon.
Interesting. There's nothing on the system requirement that would suggest so. Are laptop chips that underpowered?
The weird thing is, it doesn't look like a resource-intensive game, but somehow it is. I've been waiting months and eagerly trying every game/proton update, and it still happens. Pity because it has been a really nice story-driven game so far.
Yes and especially Intel ones.
Other then that, I had a decent amount of fun with the game once I realized that it's more of an interactive graphics novel.
And the other Lem universe is where Ijon Tichy lives, more funny, bizarre, almost phantasy like Star Wars (and the 50s retro-scifi style would fit more into this Tichy universe).
But the game won me over near instantly. Its pacing, presentation, and writing are top notch. Overall I feel that it's worth a try whether you know the original story or not. Knowing the book will spoil a lot of the, let's call them twists, very quickly, but will also provide interesting context for things shown before the protagonist finds things out on her own.
I recall that my arts teacher told me about Lem in 4th grade when I was drawing some spaceship and I told her I already read some books by him. She didn't believe me until I told her details about the stories.
"The Invincible" was mind blowing at that age and set a pretty high standard for everything in that genre I read after.
I still think my dad left it laying on the living room table intentionally for me to find. He had almost everything Lem had written until then and was probably fed up with me reading the pulp kids/teen sci-fi that I was at the time.
As I grew up in Germany pretty much all of Lems works were readily available in German, which definitely helped.
Speaking of Lem adaptions: I was already doing computer graphics/VFX in my early 20's when I gave reading "Solaris" another try (it had been too long in the tooth for me in parts as a teen).
And I recall the visual description of the ocean at multiple scales (it's two pages or more) and though: that will take years for VFX tools to get to the stage where we can visualize that.
I'd say we've only been there since less than a decade.
I also recently learned that there was a new English translation of Solaris. This version is much-hyped for being closer to the original, but as I read it, I am finding that I preferred the original translation (even though Lem himself reportedly did not like it). Anyway, huge Lem fan. Maybe an immersive game-like experience will better serve Lem’s visions. I was sorely disappointed in Soderbergh’s awful film version of Solaris. It just didn’t capture the terror of the story at all.
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Edit: You have to turn on showdead to see most of their posts.
It's a decent game / visual novel on its own, but it has absolutely nothing in common with Lem's Invincible except the name and that one core idea (which by now has become a common science fiction trope anyway - like most of Lem's ideas).
It also pulls a future Cold War scenario out of thin air which (as far as I remember) isn't even remotely mentioned in the book (which is more like a whodunit scifi crime novel which then becomes a tech thriller).
Also the decision to use a retro-future lollipop art style similar to The Jetsons is 'controversial' to say the least.
All in all, interesting and decent game (or rather "interactive graphics novel"), but marketing it as being based on Lem's book when in reality it's something entirely different (not just a book adaption with 'artistic freedom', but something entirely different) is a bit too much IMHO.
I think I'm on safe grounds calling it a walking simulator. The gameplay is limited to walking down a linear path and clicking on things until all combinations are exhausted - western equivalent of a visual novel (but with less branching).
It is slow, it takes a few large story beats to really kick off the story. If you are in the right headspace, and are a patient player who is able to sink into the atmosphere, you will be gripped by the pacing.
The atmosphere is thick, dripping with retro-futurism, chilling environmental storytelling as well as thrilling story moments. The music will raise the hair on your skin.
If you don't want to dive in, I recommend giving the OST a listen on spotify/YouTube. It stands on it's own and is a pretty good representation of the feeling of the game.
Just a bit of advice, there was one section maybe about 75% through the game where you hit a fork and you're meant to turn left, but I got turned around in the map and turned right instead. And instead of notifying me that I was going the wrong way, the game's atmospherics started very gradually getting foggier and foggier and it became harder and harder to move forward. Eventually I came to a region where my vision was so grayed-out that I could barely see a foot ahead of me. I had to ditch the rover and proceed on foot, but even then it felt like I was walking through molasses and that the way forward was somehow eluding me like a hidden passage.
I mistakenly thought that was just an expected part of the journey and I stubbornly tried to slog on in the wrong direction for what seemed like a couple of weeks. I became frustrated and was ready to give up playing and then just decided on a whim to go all the way back to the fork and try the other direction, whereupon to my surprise it became immediately obvious that I was now on the correct route, and the game proceeded normally.
That whole misadventure became to me a core part in how I experienced the game even though it effectively nothing more than a side quest to nowhere. If you ever read his (in my opinion) greatest work, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub," it felt in some way very much like that book, pushing forward with no sense of progress but a vague sense of something very wrong.
I love the setting and the aesthetics but for my live I can't stand some monster/zombie/etc bursting suddenly out of a cupboard.
But there's no monsters, creepy crawlies or anything like that. It's a more tech-focusses sci-fi story.
I have to admit I've only seen part of a playthrough of /The Invicible/, but haven't played the game myself.
Still, as a general rule, I personally would (almost) always recommend starting with the book form before trying a visual adaption.
Having seen the visuals first will heavily influence your imagination and internal vision of the writing, which would deprive you of one of the greatest joys of reading. This book in particular paints some truly awesome mental pictures that I wouldn't want to have spoiled in any way.
Another reasoning goes that the experience that came first tends to "win out" regarding your perception of the material. To me at least, a book is somehow less polarizing than a movie or a game. It stands for itself, and oftentimes (as is the case with /The Invicible/) has been standing as a recognised work for decades; it doesn't need to prove itself and can be taken as an artistic expression more or less free from the kind of economic incentives that necessarily plague a larger production.
Any adaption comes with changes and, quite possibly, shortcomings that can be more or less individually tolerable. If you play the game and don't like it for the way it tells the story, its art style, a clunky UI or whatnot, you take that baggage with you to reading the book, or in the worst case even lose interest and forego doing so altogether. That would (arguably) be a much greater loss than the other way around.
Adaptions do have their advantages, mainly in creating an impressive audiovisual environment, which can evoke some very immediate emotions. But those themes have been chosen and interpreted by the adaptor and are not necessarily identical to the original author's intentions.
Condensation in adaption to a different medium generally comes at a loss of depth that IMHO makes it hard to re-experience the source material without bias, and thus encumbers its full appreciation; not least because even in the best case it forestalls the setting, and often the twists and the conclusion as well.
In the end I would argue that a book tends to give a humanistically richer experience. It gives ample time to fathom its themes, to reflect and interpret them without visual distractions. Adaptions of great works can be great in their own right, but not too many stand the test of time as well as the books that came before them, and in that light I myself prefer to keep that order.
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.
(Last time I made this comment it was immediately downvoted to oblivion. Shortly thereafter, the post itself disappeared from the HN front page, perhaps due to some kind of brigade-detection?)