Not the best reviews
73 on OC
Alas, no review (yet) from a person who loves the game in the official sources in the aggregators. Strong positive feelings from someone who can express them is all I need to at least make a purchase. If it can’t create a single confident partisan, doom.
There are three 9/10s:
But are they positive.
Detour: This caused an investigation with unexpected results, and I haven’t read those top reviews yet. I thought Metacritic and Open Critic would be basically the same. No, no.
Metacritic has 24 reviews posted. It’s selection for “all” reviews only shows me the 17 PC reviews. I had to fetch 7 PS5 reviews separately. 9 of all of the reviews are only listed on Metacritic at this time.
Open Critic has 28 reviews. However, in the default sorting, the last review on the first page replaces the first review on the second page. 13 sites are only aggregated on Open Critic.
37 reviews total, 15 of which are listed in both OC and MC. Less than half? I’m quite surprised. Also, the score from Spaziogames is listed as 7 / 10 at OC and 78 at MC. Visiting the review myself, with browser translation enabled, it looks like a 7. I haven’t heard of any curve like that at MC.
Now to reconcile the fact I could have played through half of the game in the time I went looking into these details. My gut says this data detour was the more enjoyable choice. 100 / 100
Reviews don’t interest me terribly, but this game still does. I am planning to pick up a copy next week and will very likely post my own impressions.
This made me chuckle.
I am a huge Lem fan, so I will buy this for that reason alone.
The Verge seems to have liked it: The Invincible review: stranded on a harsh alien world - The Verge
Me too. Bolstered by the Firewatch in space comp that led one of the reviews, I just bought the game.
$24 this week on Steam and on Xbox store. Not a huge discount, but the game just came out, so it’s a fairly decent discount.
Creates a greeat sense of atmosphere and mystery. I did put it aside when various work/life/ other game stuff crossed my path. I picked it up briefly yesterday, and want to continue to the end. I’ll admit, I’m at a point where I’m not entirely certain where to go/what to do next and that’s probably why I put it down so easily last month. I plan to play it through this weekend.
For a story-game or walking simulator, it was solid (particularly after they patched some game-breaking bugs). It’s just long enough, with some consequential decisions.
I cannot imagine replaying it, but it was a good experience. I am happy to support weird projects like this.
I’ve jumped into this one, and it really nails that late 70s early 80s hard sci fi with sweeping landscapes feel. It also looks great on the OLED Steam Deck and maybe works even better on it because it feels like it’s “high resolution” on that size screen / pixel density, and of course an atmospheric game like this benefits from good color saturation if it’s game area.
Right now it feels a lot like Firewatch the Sci-Fi game though.
What a great game! It’s a mature and engaging work of love to bring this old cold war era book of Stanislaw Lem to life. The attention to geology in creating the setting, scene framing (the connection between dialog, geography, and setting), as well as a great deal of dialog with good performances, really elevates what is fundamentally a walking simulator into something more profound. It really is narratively ‘paced well’ with only a few spots that seem to drag, yet if they drag, this feels as much an organic part of the narrative experience.This might be one of my favorite games of the last few years.
Mild spoilers ahead:
The game deviates from the actual storyline of Lem and turns itself also into a kind of nostalgic retro-futurism where these centralized, bureaucratic nation-states are proudly academic, scientific, and not driven by pure wealth generation. It feels authentic to that Eastern European milieu Lem came from. But by deviating it really changes the meaning of the game’s title.
It holds together almost until the very end, at which point the game narrative pivots back to the sci-fi points the original book posited, kind of on a dime, but never explored nor had the time to resolve those plot points, and sort of leaves a couple major plot points left kind of unresolved. It feels a bit like a funnel of bringing the big ideas of the story back into the game. There are some loose ends in certain narrative points where they deviated from the book for the sake of the different game’s narrative, but were not really fixed by the end. It doesn’t detract too much from the overall experience though.
I like this idea of ‘necro-evolution’ as a term for synthetic biology, there’s a sense that Lem had that no mechanical process is really an analogue of living biological evolutionary processes. Things like machines evolving are “dead” evolution, not “living” evolution". And actually, that’s probably the most insightful philosophical opinion that’s not really contemporary anymore and still might be worth pondering
I decided to play this, after so much action playing games like Helldivers 2 or Wrath, I thought it would be a good change, while at the same time I wanted something short.
So yeah, I liked it very much. Although perhaps it is not surprising, I haven’t read the specific novel is based but I have read a decent amount of ‘classic’ 50-70s scifi, so I was very much in the target segment market for this kind of story. To make it more clear is scifi from the time when ‘science fiction’ was called like that because it was more… literal, it was fiction about some scientists or a serious scientific discovery, it wasn’t about Jedis or Hollywood crap.
Speaking of, the story is really very simple, the good part is the execution, how the mystery is slowly opened, how you learn what’s the deal with the planet by phases, how the player is very well put in the role of the protagonist so there is no dissonance between both, how you learn information with her and her reactions feel natural to what she is living, in general the writing is good and smart, which together the very good voice acting, it makes for an immersive experience where you really empathize with the characters.
It’s also a game that is nice to look at, and the retro aesthetic is well done.
Perhaps the weak point is the end itself, the climax is a bit underwhelming. Still, it deserved better than a 72/100 in Metacritic.
The book has a pretty anticlimactic ending too. Once what was happening on the planet was clear-ish, that was pretty much it. I think at the time, these were radical ideas, and provided the point of the story in themselves. I haven’t played it though :)
It’s on sale at GOG for $22.49, or 25% off thru 4-4-24.
I was thinking of finally picking up Cyberpunk 2077 since it’s also on sale there for $30, but I ran across this thread now, and now must choose between two very different kinds of games. Gah.
I’m not sure what you refer to? I mean, we don’t know what any of the two factions will do with the planet in the future, but I wouldn’t call that a unresolved plot.
My issue with the climax is that convincing the technician to not nuke the swarm is kinda a ‘doh’ moment, not a revelation. It’s like trying to get vengeance from a plague of locusts or something like that. It was clearly not sentient, at least not at the same level of a human. A bit of idiot ball there, although it is somewhat understandable in the stressed, half-crazy character.
Even more, it seemed clear to me that that type of life was really all over the planet, so you can’t simply kill it with a few dozens nukes.
Also, Yasna’s revelation that the mech life came from some other visiting ancient aliens was a bit of a stretch. I actually believed up to that point that the metallic life was something really native to the planet, an alternate new type of life to carbon-based proteinic life that appeared after the Nova killed most normal organic life.
If i recall:
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The game creates two factions, and the player discovers survivors from the opposing faction. It becomes clear they’ve been on the planet for almost a year. Yet they aren’t dead from hypoxia / atmospheric toxicity. The game indicates that not having a helmet for a few hours is enough to create a toxic dose of trace atmospheric gases… but these guys are alive for a year. They sort of kind of try and explain how a bit but it’s pretty threadbare.
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It doesn’t explain why the protagonist keeps getting mind zapped but remains relatively functional, whereas her shipmates are getting zapped at the same frequency but more or less are mind-wiped by the time she finds them.
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It doesn’t really explain what the opposing faction was trying to do (imo). Nor does it explain why it took them almost a year to send the Invincible to rescue them.
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The other faction, whatever is going is, is massively overpowering the player’s faction. Basically the player faction is running on shoestrings and hope, and the other faction has resources 100x yours (your ship barely has enough resources for 8 people and two landers, while they have seemingly innumerable people and dozens? of landers per ship). Whatever the underlying politics isn’t explained but the framing feels kind of wrong.
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The whole premise is to find the Invincible as some kind of spy mission. It… sort of forgets about this by the end.
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The whole stretch to ‘aliens’ is pretty much a heavy stretch from the threadbare data, as you said previously. Basically there were dinosaurs, and then the dinosaurs were killed by the flies. But this… also seems to have killed all other forms of life on the planet, including plant life. It also makes this even bigger stretch that there was a ‘war’ between synthetic flies and this is the end result of it. I do like however that the planet turns into the equivalent of a paper clip factory, more or less.