Invincible will ask a lot of viewers, but the payoff could be well worth it

^ Stay tuned for 1080p gaming and the impression that expands through your video screen: it’s futuristic!

Led by Starward Industries, a super team of developers who can list esteemed projects like The Witcher 3, Dying Light, and Call of Juarez on their collective resumes, Invincible is an adventure game based on the critically acclaimed genre work by a famous Polish author, I haven’t read it, and neither have you.

That’s where its resemblance to The Witcher game begins and ends. Invincible is a landmark hard sci-fi work that explores the dangers of space colonization and the nature of alien life: the forms it might take, whether we’ll recognize it, and how our biases affect our encounters with it Decisions in Time. Rather than a step-by-step adaptation of the original, the game of the same name is a retelling centered on a new character, Yasna: a heroine who doesn’t exist in the novel, but serves as a concession to the fact that it’s no longer the mid-’60s.

As Yasna, you’re on the planet Regis III looking for clues about what happened to your old crew, who all mysteriously died here after coming into contact with something. The 45-minute demo we played offers what appears to be an early chapter of the game, in which Yasna investigates a rocky valley littered with abandoned vehicles, damaged automata, and astronaut corpses. It’s brutal from the start, but Invincible isn’t a horror game, and there isn’t any excessive gore here, nor a single jump scare.

There is something that is nervous. An ominous vibe that keeps you trapped between fear and desire to learn more. As your avatar, Yasna wears a spacesuit and can feel it in every movement: this is not a space Lara Croft, she’s necessarily slow to climb obstacles and clumsy when operating complex machinery (which you’ll do a lot) take into account Her giant space gloves. In practical terms, this means that if the waste gets into the air recovery system, you are doomed.

The game was the most fun to play: More than once there was a scene where every instinct of yours as a video game junkie was thwarted by a spacesuit: no running or dodging. only hope. Aside from the constant sense of danger, this is not a beautiful planet: it is a barren tomb. It’s a universe where the digital revolution never happened – what the developers describe as an “atomic punk” setting.

This in practice means a pleasant retro-futurism, like stepping into the illustrated cover of a classic sci-fi novel. The land is littered with analog tech, mechanical robot Robbie, and anti-gravity vehicles with all the curves and booms of a 1960 Buick LeSabre – it’s almost goofy and a stark contrast to the sheer desolation of Earth itself.

The overall effect is depressing, but not overpowering: the allure of unraveling the mysteries of Regis III, and the methodical tactile, investigative pace of the game is enough to regularly distract from the general unease.

So other than wandering around feeling anxious, what are you actually doing? Well, you wander around, looking at things, fiddling with things. It’s all pretty basic from a gameplay standpoint, with the invisible voice of your commander actually guiding you through each step, and he’ll crackle over the radio with a reassuring rhythm. During the demo, we got to know the various equipment in Yasna’s permanent inventory: various scanners, most of them in beautiful period detail, with twisted cathode ray displays, chrome bevels and filament bulbs. It certainly has the unique feel of a tutorial level, so we believe the game itself will be less restrictive to your activities. In fact, in interviews, the developers used Invincible as a branching narrative that emphasized player choice.

Early on, the game had you piece together destruction scenes from black box lithographs salvaged by automatic tank weapons. It subtly makes people slowly realize that the danger that befalls the soul on the recording is still very much alive and that you are in a very dangerous situation. Here’s a conceptually dangerous moment, more effective than any cheap jump scare, that demonstrates the effectiveness of patient pacing: If you believe the audience doesn’t need constant movement, you can reward them for special, subtle moments, Will be with them for days, weeks, or even years.

It’s clear that the developers love and understand what hard sci-fi is about, and aren’t afraid to translate the genre’s trust and respect for audiences into games that let moments breathe, even forcing players to pause for a moment and take in some dialogue. You can read this as a roundabout, it might end up being a bit boring, and, for a large part of the user base, a real possibility and a pitfall of the genre: big, complex ideas need space can become large and complex.

So, it won’t be for everyone. But its ambitions are undeniable: a next-gen exclusive game designed to give the medium its own strain of Andromeda, or Solaris, without sacrificing vision to unnecessarily speed up the pace.

Invincible will be released next year on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC