It’s not how a game feels at the time but how it feels after that defines it. That’s a thought I’ve been chewing in my mind like gum for most of the year. How it settles; that’s the clincher. There can be extraordinarily strong feelings when you’re playing a game, but months later, do you want to go back? Ask yourself. The answer is telling.
Yes, I want to go back to The Invincible, a walking-pace adaptation of a novel by the same name, written by Polish author Stanisław Lem. The answer surprises me, because when I reviewed The Invincible in 2023, I didn’t have those extraordinarily strong feelings I mentioned. Three out of five stars, I gave it. Intriguing but slim, I said. “The Invincible is a spectacular adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s book, but it’s limited in terms of what you can do in it, and the impact on the story you have.” I stand by what I wrote. Yet, I also yearn to go back.
To me, The Invincible – now added to PlayStation Plus Extra, which suits it enormously – is an exhibition. A recreation and celebration of a place we can’t otherwise go. This is a place dreamt during an era which long ago passed us by. An era of clumpy Smeg refrigerators and tank-like steel cars, when such things as weight and realism didn’t seem to get in the way. It’s hard sci-fi, technically, which means the story is concerned with scientific accuracy, but labelling it that way gives the wrong impression. To me, this belongs far more to Space romance. To storytellers laying on the grass and looking at the stars and wondering what magnificent things might be out there. All that matters is possibility. Unfettered imagination rules all.
The Invincible celebrates impossible sci-fi design. There are creations here that would never get out of Earth’s atmosphere, and yet, here they are hulking-around in Space. This is a game of sci-fi toys and chromatic machines, with knobs and dials to push and pull, which beep and whirr as you follow the footsteps of your missing crew. A game that begs you to touch, to feel the rusted surface of buggies you find abandoned, or to clack the chunky buttons of locator-devices in your hand, as you venture towards surface anomalies.
This focus on gadgetry wouldn’t work if The Invincible otherwise asked too much of you – if it was busy making you run and jump and shoot and fight. But it doesn’t; it allows the atmosphere to breathe. The Invincible is content to unfold gently and unhurriedly, and for you to sightsee and gaze at postcard horizons and improbable planetary views – all while wondering where you are and what’s going on. It gives you time and space to examine, time and space to appreciate. An evening stroll – that’s what it is – and there’s great worth in a calming experience like that, especially among games that agitate and rile us up.
That’s not to say there’s no tension or excitement here. There is – there’s enough to pull your curiosity through, and there’s a climax still piercingly relevant even 61 years after Lem’s book was released. But a malleable and reactive experience this is not. The Invincible is a story to be experienced rather than to shape.
But that’s okay. This is a grand and lavish recreation of a story I would otherwise have had no experience of, and such are the sights in the game they will stay with me for a long time (that spaceship!). I’m glad I walked around in it, and I’m doubly glad it’s easier for many of you to walk around it now too. Fondly remembered, it certainly is.
