I got this game through the Humble Choice, I think. I did have it on my Steam wish list for a while back when it was released in 2023 but as usual, if a game lingers on the wish list for too long I remove it; as they say, if you love something set it free and if it returns to you, it was meant to be. Good thing, too, because I managed to complete this one in a little under six hours (HowLongToBeat.com says I’m roughly on par with a basic play-through).

The game is based on a 1964 novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem of the same name. I haven’t read the novel, but according to the Wikipedia source on it, the game and the novel follow roughly the same plot, although shifted in both time and focus. The synopsis of the novel talks about the arrival of the massive battleship Invincible to the planet of Regis III, tasked with finding out what happened to its sister ship, the Condor. In the game, you play as Yasna, a biologist who is part of a different crew, the Dragonfly, who arrive on Regis III as part of a planetary survey. The Invincible doesn’t show up in the game until the end, but it is still in search of the Condor and, to be frank, I don’t think the title of the work has anything to do with the battleship of the same name.

Spoilers for the game ahead.

Everything about the desert planet of Regis III indicates that while painfully inhospitable, it should be capable of supporting life…but there is none. When the game begins, Yasna is waking from unconsciousness on a bluff on the planet. The other members of her team are missing, and the team’s Astrogator, Novik, is still aboard the Dragonfly. Novik serves as Yasna’s sanity-slash-sounding board as she wanders Regis III looking for her crew.

Despite being more or less dead, Regis III has three curious features. The first is a series of metal piping that runs beneath the surface of the world like veins. Occasionally, these structures break through the crust like sculpted towers. The second is the presence of metallic bushes which show no sense of life. The third, which Yasna encounters after having found evidence of the crew of the Condor, are small metallic “flies”. These tri-tipped organisms show rudimentary behaviors in low numbers, but when they gather in a critical mass, they appear to gain an animalistic level of sentience.

As Yasna explores, she finds her missing crew members. Some are dead, and some are “gone”, reduced to an almost infantile stage of mental processing. Once she encounters evidence of the Condor she finds more of the same except for Rohytra, an engineer from the Condor who seems fine at first but eventually shows signs of a decline in mental abilities. Yasna and Novik come to believe that the fly swarm can interrupt human electromagnetic brain waves which is what ultimately lead to Yasna’s repeated blackouts, Rohytra’s cyclic memory loss, and the deaths of the crews of the Dragonfly and the Condor.

Ultimately, Yasna and Rohytra race to escape the threat of a mass collection of these flies, and the game ends on both a philosophical and narrative cliffhanger. Rohytra desperately wants to destroy the flies as revenge for what it did to his crew, but — in the case of my play through — Yasna convinces him that the swarm is just doing what it knows how to do and has no malicious intent, and besides, despite having used their biggest weapons against the swarm, it seems almost…invincible.

As a game, The Invincible is probably classified as a “walking simulator”. Yasna cannot jump, and can only navigate around obstacles or climb by pressing forward at designated areas. She has three tools: a metal detector, a life-sign/motion detector, and an electronic spyglass. Intractable elements are designated with small circles, eye icons, or binocular icons, depending on the distance and how the interaction is meant to play out. There aren’t any puzzles per-se, but there are cases where Yasna needs to work controls in order to achieve a status that pushes the story forward.

Decisions that the player make do matter, and it’s apparently possible to get different results if tackled differently multiple times. I’m not sure how different, though, as this is a game based on a novel that’s considered “iconic” in Poland, although with the slightly altered approach that the developers took, it might have granted some leeway to give the player some agency in the end.

Considering the novel was written in 1964, the game does a bang up job of cleaving to both the sentiment and — more importantly — the aesthetic of ideas of a mid-20th century Space Age, which I just learned is referred to as “atompunk”. Yasna and the crew of the Dragonfly represent a “Western” themed bloc which is progressive on Lem’s part considering that Poland was only just making it’s first real moves to break free of Soviet control at the time the novel was written. The crews of the Condor and Invincible, then, represent the “Soviet” bloc “Alliance”. Novik is concerned about Yasna’s repeated desire to make contact with the crew of the Condor, fearing that she’ll be captured and maybe killed.

While we don’t get a lot of iconography from the side of the Dragonfly, we do get a whole lot of representation from the Condor side. Their typography is blocky like Cyrillic lettering (although it’s all in English), they rely on some bold color choices, and their mechanics are functional and austere. We see many of the machines of the Alliance including a cramped buggy, crab-like “atomat” artillery robots, and the fearsome “cyclops” that Rohytra sends out to fight off the swarm of flies that threatens the Condor. Aside from the visual choices, the execution of design is top notch, and I found it a bit unnerving how close the video game visuals matched what I’d come to expect from 1950-1970’s sci-fi paperback cover illustrations that I’ve seen.

I appreciate that the game was relatively short, and I am satisfied with all but one of the decisions I made as Yasna (I wish I had chosen a different ending). An interesting inclusion is that the game unlocks comic book panels as decisions are made, and I could recap my game-journey at any time through this version of the narrative. The game does offer the ability to replay chapters, but the final chapter starts at a point well away from the final ending, so I don’t know that I’d want to plow through all of that segment again just to choose the other ending; I can skip the in-game cut-scenes if I wish, and I might do just that if I find myself with nothing more pressing to do before I opt to uninstall the game.

I am pleased with my experience with The Invincible. While I occasionally found myself thinking that the story trended towards the simplistic, I had to remind myself that the story was written in 1964, and at the time these concepts which now seem relatively low-rent and uninspiring are only so because of the influence of everything I’ve consumed post-1964; at the time, this story apparently banged pretty damn hard, with it’s central theme that “maybe not everything is for humanity”. There is no BBEG in this, only a nature we cannot comprehend despite our best efforts, our inability to overcome what we cannot control, and the realization that no, not everything in the Universe is for humanity.