intro

	Something I've been meaning to do for close to two decades is write down my thoughts on some of the very best games ever made. "Who is this guy to make such claims?" you might say. Well, I've been playing games since 1984. It's no exaggeration to claim that I've consumed thousands of games.
	
	Yes, I've got a strong bias towards adventure and simulation games which per default make me ill suited to review games in general. But I'm not reviewing games, I'm highlighting the ones you really need to play.
	
	My hope with this series is not just to shine a light on current games but to work my way backwards through the entire history of video games. How I'll find the time to do that remains to be seen, but here goes.

preface

	The invincible is a narrative focused, first-person adventure game based on the 1964 sci-fi novel written by polish author Stanisław Lem.
	
	It immediately takes a detour from the novel and focuses on the crew of the Dragonfly, a research vessel belonging to the commonwealth instead of, like the novel, focusing on the crew of The invincible.

story

	This is as close as you can get to a perfectly implemented guided walking sim. If you played Firewatch you'll have a good idea of how the game unfurls. While it has a chunk of side-exploration being possible, enabling you to find story elements you might otherwise miss, the game is fully on rails and makes no apologies about it.
	
	As previously mentioned the story diverges from the novel and takes place before The invincible sets down to explore the planet. Thus enabling the novel to remain unaffected by what takes place in the game. This is a thoughtful and respectful way to handle the source material in my opinion. Too many times we've gotten games that attempt to re-write the source material to shoehorn itself in.
	
	There's no way for me to go in depth concerning the story without spoiling everything so I'll just note that it concerns alternative evolution and notes that consciousness (or sentience)  is not necessarily a factor that dictates which lifeform assumes dominance of an eco-system. In fact, it can be a detracting factor. Lem coined the phrase necroevolution, a term to describe how inorganic matter could evolve.
	
	The novel, and the game, also details how the Fermi paradox could be explained by the very nature that non-conscious, non-living evolution would be so foreign that there simply was no way to discover it unless you were directly searching for it. And you can't be directly searching for something that you cannot know exists since by its very definition it defies what you would call life.

presentation

	The game is absolutely stunning. Every canyon is a sight to behold. The mechanical structures are intricate. The sky continually surprised me as I glanced up in wonder.
	
	Voice actors can make or break a game. In this game they're outright perfect. While the vast majority of speech is from either the actor playing you or the actor that assumes the role of Astrogator Novik you do get a handful of others joining in. In every single case I went "yep, that's what they should sound like".
	
	Throughout the game the actors comment on elements you encounter with (to my untrained ear) believable scientific jargon that doesn't pull any punches but won't leave you googling. The talk system can be slightly annoying at times, unfortunately, where you need to hold a button to interject your character's thoughts (out of a list you can choose from). I understand what they were going for but I failed to interject in time a couple of times, which left me annoyed.
	
	But on the flip-side the dialogue flow is pretty amazing. If you happen to blunder into something while the Astrogator is talking about something else he'll pause himself, switch topic, then switch back afterwards noting "where was I?". I've never seen anything quite like that before. While I'm not sure if it's related to this or just a bug I did encounter at least one problem with the characters commenting on something that never occurred in my playthrough, it might have been that I blundered past something though.
	
	All of the technology featured in the game has a delightful mix of futurism blended with USSR style technology. It's all low-key believable.
	
	As you uncover plot elements it's all recorded in a comic style book you can access from the main menu. Depending on your choices the comic changes. Neat. There's a ton of alternative endings but they're quite similar. I'd recommend watching a youtube compilation since the variance is low enough to not warrant more playthroughs, the majority can be gotten towards the very end though.

tech

	Worked flawlessly from start to finish with wine-ge.
	
	I have no idea what engine they're using but it's fantastic. The only problem I encountered was that VRAM usage would absolutely spike at times, far beyond my measly 6gb. This led to severe stuttering as textures were swapped in and out.
	
	Initially I assumed it was because I was running it through wine but there's reports of windows users having the same issue with the developers recognizing it. By the time you're reading this it'll likely be fixed. I just restarted the game when it happened.

links

	11 bit studios
	Good old games
	Wikipedia - game
	Wikipedia - novel
	Wikipedia - Stanisław Herman Lem