The Invincible

[h2] The Book is better, Sorry [/h2] TL;DR: Only buy if you are 100% sure you can't or won't read the book. Pretty but subpar adaptation of a great story. [h3] Graphics, Sound Effects, Music [/h3] First, let's get the circumstantial things out of the way. The game looks very nice. Lighting and textures create a wonderful and eerie atmosphere. The models exude just the style of clunky atompunk sci-fi aesthetic that I imagined while I was reading the book. There is a great sense of scale that comes with everything which adds to the feeling of inferiority that the story is trying to convey. Music and sound effects contribute a great deal here as well and the voice acting is - an opinion that may place me in the minority of other reviews - well done too. [h3] Gameplay [/h3] As this is a walking sim, there is not much gameplay to speak of. You mainly walk or drive around, look at things and occasionally click on them. I will say that the clicks of dials and buttons as well as the warbles of retro machinery and tools added a delightful haptic aspect to every interaction. There is one action scene that I would hesitate to even call "combat". It was unnecessary and felt tacked on by developers who feared their players growing bored. [h3] Story [/h3] The original novel by Stanislaw Lem was a foundational piece of science-fiction literature, focusing on the unease that comes from encountering utterly alien phenomena. Most importantly though, it uses the Steel Behemoth "The Invincible", with all its crew, machinery and overwhelming weaponry, to give a humbling warning to humanity. All those fantastical toys amount to little more than a bigger stick to club things with. And there will always be someone with a bigger stick (or a trillion microscopically small ones, in this case). I'm not sure if the game conveys the same message. The marketing material seems to suggest so. But throughout my entire playthrough, the writers here seemed torn between telling their own story and adapting that of Lem from over half a century ago, the storytelling mechanisms of which it poorly emulated rather than understood and adapted to this new medium. What do I mean by this? First, they made alot of changes. We are not, as in the book, placed in the shoes of the second-in-command of the Invincible. Nor is our protagonist part of the Condor's crew, the first gigantic spaceship to arrive on the planet. Instead, we are part of a small research ship of... the Commonwealth, a rivaling political entity that was never mentioned in the book. I suspect this was done to reduce the crew size, making space for more meaningful connections to them, as well as provide a potentially interesting twist of competing for the discovery of a new weapon and eventually finding common ground in the face of an overwhelming threat. Unfortunately, the former falls flat since every other crew member is already incapacitated at the start of the story. The latter doesn't really happen, as you yourself don't know the reason for the expedition and you can't really mess up the cooperation part. The Condor, which in the book was wiped out over the course of a week or so, instead had its suffering dragged out by over a year. This was done in order to give the player some room to discover more themselves, which is a clumsy choice, but I suspect a necessary one. In spite of all these changes, the developers were not shy about their admiration of the source material. They lift many lines verbatim from the book and give it to the protagonist and her allies. The discoveries, debates and hasty countermeasures by the Invincible crew from the book are given to you and the Condor's crew instead. These countermeasures however are just mentioned on a piece of paper in a side room and don't have any impact on anything. I struggle to think of any reason to include this, other than a hamfisted "Look, we read the book, do you recognise this?". In summary, the story of this game, which is technically a prequel to the book, does not work as such, since all the discoveries that are made over ~200 pages have already been completed and the Invincible crew would just need to read the documents. On the other hand, since large parts of the original story were lifted verbatim and shoddily transplanted, the game cannot stand well on its own. Surely there is a middle ground between paying homage to a literary giant and developing your own on its shoulders, but the developers didn't find it.