Inside The Invincible – Game Informer

Marek Markuszewski, the game director of Starward Industries discusses the creation process. He also outlines the expectations for a new team. The company wanted to gather a group of experienced but still-passionate developers, all focused on the idea of creating something ambitious despite the studio’s smaller size. The surprise, however, comes from the studio’s approach to narrative. According to Markuszewski, Starward looked for stories that weren’t already “exploited” by media when figuring out its first project. It wanted to tell a story that hadn’t been told.

Admittedly, where Starward landed was a story told before – almost 60 years ago, in the novel The Invincible, written by Stanisław Lem. It contains the names of all the members of the crew. InvincibleA spacecraft explores Regis III to find its missing sistership. The spacecraft discovers self-replicating devices that become more hostile as time passes. They ask themselves questions about life and the role technology plays in our daily lives.

For Starward, comprised of developers previously from CD Projekt Red, Techland, and more, it was the right fit for its narrative ambitions – something dense and literary. And for what it’s worth, video game adaptations of novels are relatively rare.

In Starward’s The Invincible, you assume the role of Yasna, a scientist. As is typical for video games, the protagonist acts as a unreliable narrator. She knows she’s a scientist. She knows she came here with a crew that’s since gone missing. Many of her memories have become blurred. A voice on the other end of an earpiece, that of the “Astrogator,” helps you along your journey.

It’s all fairly standard video game fare, though the source material is an interesting starting point. Lem is well-known for his hard science fiction approach, which was a hallmark of the universe of The InvincibleIt feels well-realized, believable and true to its story. It’s perfectly conceivable to imagine it translating to a video game well, where players are incentivized to explore, experiment within, and discover the world around them. With the help of the team’s insights, I will have the opportunity to do exactly that for the next hour.

Slides

Yasna is the first pre-alpha build I played in The Invincible. She explores her environment, takes note, then reports back to The Astrogator. I’m looking for a lost convoy – and perhaps other survivors. Things aren’t going well.

The Invincible looks amazing. Textures have lots of definition – I can really tell these are rocks everywhere I look – and the bright bask of the sun gives off a feeling of warmth as it bakes the ground around Yasna. Regis III mostly looks like Mars – red, arid, dull. The setting is bleak, but it’s done in such a way as to emphasize the desolation. There isn’t much to do in The Invincible other than go forward and look around. This is what the environment does.

Now, I’m ready to move. It is possible to move in stealth or directly towards my goal. The direct route is the one I prefer. After a short drive, I find one of the convoy’s vehicles trapped under a collapse of rocks. Yasna points out that radiation levels are very high in this area. As I make my way through the car, and then out of the wreckage sideways, I come across an antimatter gun that is mobile. Actually, there are two. One is intact. One destroyed. Another is the massive tunnel cut into a rock face. I will make one last discovery: A corpse.

Yasna takes the onboard recorder out of the antimatter gun, and I can see the carnage unfolding in front me. Yasna watches the convoy go towards its destination. All seems well. However, the plan goes awry upon reaching Yasna’s current location.

The antimatter beam is used by the team to create their path through the rock. They also retrieve materials from the tunnel that they made with the antimatter cannon. Next, you can see the group rushing to their new hole. The cannon is also seen firing into the hole. Then chaos ensued. The antimatter cannons fire at each other and obliterate it. Before turning their beam on the people, the beam hits the human. It rips them apart, as you would expect. “It’s monstrous what the antimatter beam does to the human body,” Yasna remarks. She finally looks at the last slide. It is a still of her inspecting the cannon. She’s shocked but decides to continue her exploration, turning her sights to whatever’s on the other side of the tunnel.

Dense

It doesn’t take long to figure out The Invincible is a slow game – both literally and narratively. It takes time to do just about anything, from walking to your objective (there is, thankfully, a sprint button which I found after some time in the menus) to listening to Yasna and the Astrogator talk, which they do – a lot.

Markuszewski says that this was a conscious choice. This makes sense. The work of Stanisław Lem is, again, dense. Lem is often categorized as a “hard” sci-fi author, meaning the work is focused on being scientifically accurate and believable based on current technologies and theoretical possibilities.

“He was kind of a prophet, writing about things like [the] matrix, ebooks,” Markuszewski says.

“Internet,” art director Wojtek Ostrycharz adds.

“Internet, cell phones,” marketing manager Maciej Dobrowolski pipes in. “All those things, yeah.”

The process of transferring information to the reader via images and dialogue takes time. As Markuszewski points out, in a book, you can spend as many pages as you want to describe how something looks or a character’s thoughts and feelings. Video games don’t quite have that luxury; adapting The InvincibleTo make it interactive was quite a task.

“If you’re going with the much more conventional approach, like real-time action, leading a character, being in the place – normal pacing, normal speed – you don’t have this stop-moment [to visualize] all the very attractive parts of the book,” Markuszewski says. “It’s tricky to have really short slots for describing all the emotions or concepts [that we want to discuss].”

Starward needs to balance the two, based on what I’ve seen. Markuszewski is wrong. I spent a lot of time listening to the characters talk and occasionally selecting a prompt. If there’s one major issue I have so far, it is the game’s pacing. It’s hard to know how much Starward can fix this before launch, but with such an interesting story concept, it’s a shame that it’s delivered in often-tedious ways.

Danger

The tunnel ends with me finding a robot that is carrying a box and circling a cave. Yasna then notes that the robot has become stuck to his job.

Further in I discover metallic plants sprouting from cave walls. Yasna and the Astrogator then debate the nature of biology – whether or not the metal in front of us can be classified as alive or not if it lacks things like membranes, organs, and the like. This is all very rich in theoretical science fiction jargon, which you slowly consume as you wait for The Invincible’s next goal.

My little robot breaks the loop on his way to point B and starts walking out of the cave. Following my little robot’s lead, I make my way back towards the cave with the antimatter cannons. My mechanical friend walks on his own, embarking on an adventure. The in-tact antimatter gun comes to life as he continues his journey. The cannon turns towards me and shoots at the robot.

My hands were ready to dodge the danger, and then I was ready to fight back to protect my life from sudden death. I still remember the slides that I looked at, recalling how it ripped through my convoy. I’m ready to use their failures to my advantage, to save my own life from utter destruction. On the other end of the line, Astrogator begins panicking, knowing I’m likely mere seconds from death. “Fight,” he yells into my ear.

To not spoil anything, I’ll stop short of revealing more of what I played. If you’re excited for The Invincible or a fan of the novel, some of the narrative moments you’re looking forward to come next. After this initial set-up and some further exploration, I will say that I’m left with many questions about what’s happening on Regis III and who is on the desolate planet.

Take a look at these ideas

I have many questions mainly because I was able to see a mission at a later stage and not understand the context. One conversation between Yasna and Astrogator stands out to me – the earlier chat about the metal plants, biology, and the human condition.

I don’t think that particular moment has anything interesting to say – or anything other games haven’t already explored in great detail, such as 2017’s Nier: Automata, for example. But I do like a video game asking these questions – if only because it’s a rare example of a big-budget game taking the time to explore more nuanced, mature questions, even if a specific moment isn’t adding too much to the conversation. In its current form, I have problems with how The Invincible is telling its story structurally, but I can’t help but feel like its themes are a welcome change of pace. And I feel that’s exactly what Starward was going for – that the developers want players to think about new concepts and ideas.

“I had this one great feeling when I was playing Persona 5, where after an hour and a half of playing that game, I actually had to stop, go outside, have a cigarette, and go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe what this game is about,’” Starward’s community manager Michał Napora says. “Maybe people don’t need to go at [it in] this extreme way – go out and smoke cigarettes – but it’d be cool if they finish the game and maybe thought about some things that they didn’t think about before.”

Original publication: Issue 346, Game Informer.