Developer: Starward Industries | Released: 2023 | Genre: Adventure, Facile
Take the excellent Firewatch, throw it in a blender together with Lifeless Moon, maintain the first person perspective, hit the blender button – and you’ll end up with something much like The Invincible.
The game is based on a science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem.
As Yasna, a female astronaut originally party of a small team landing on a barren planet, you wake up in the sand much like Matt Damon did in The Martian – albeit with amnesia. Thankfully the amnesia part is not a significant part of the game. Soon she remembers most of what she needs to remember, except for the main purpose of the game – where to find the other astronaut team members.
It doesn’t take long until she has another person on the radio that she talks to throughout most of the game. Commander Novik is in orbit and can only hear what she is doing – she has to describe the things she finds. Often this evolves into interesting discussions, and sometimes they even get mad at each other. If you have played Firewatch, this is the part that reminded me so much of that game.
Both the voice acting and the dialog writing is solid.
The conversation between Yasna and Novik is not always automatic. Sometimes a dialog choice occurs, but it mostly seems to be complementary, like expanding and adding flavor. The interface for the dialog choice is weird. Instead of just clicking options as they appear, you have to hold down a key to make the options appear as radio buttons, then use the mouse wheel to select one of them and release.
The game looks and feels like a proper first person adventure at first, but it doesn’t take long until you realize it’s actually very close to being a genuine walking simulator. Climbing and jumping happens with an icon and a key press that feels almost superfluous, and interacting with mechanical equipment is just using obvious knobs and buttons. There are no real puzzles.
You do get to drive and fly vehicles at times, but it doesn’t make the game much less linear.
Most of the game is linear, but it does try to shake that up with the illusion of choice. At one point you even do get a choice of where to go, but it turns out the first option just leads back to the second one. Yasna has a map with icons, but it’s one of the duds of the game. The map is typically split up across several pages and it’s confusing. Usually I just settled with figuring it out myself. Worked for me.
Where the game does branch off is right at the end, offering an impressive 11 endings.
In the beginning of the game, before getting Novik on the radio, Yasna was sometimes humming a tune to herself. That melody seemed familiar. What was it?
Krauta reminded me of Dyatlov in Chernobyl, both by looks and attitude.
At one point I had to get close to an alliance base without being seen, and I was advised to park my car in a safe spot. I did as I was asked to do but as I got closer, the base turned out to be empty. The paths around the base was longer and wider than usual, clearly indicating that the developers meant for me to drive and not walk on them. There was even a dialog line where she insinuated that she was driving and not walking. I soon got quite far away from my car. As I decided the paths were too long for me to walk, I tried to get back and fetch the car. But somehow, the game had closed off the access to the earlier area, and I was forced to keep walking. It wasn’t a catastrophe as I found another vehicle later, but I was thinking the developers should have had Novik tell Yasna that since the base seemed to be abandoned, she might as well go back and fetch the car before it was too late.
I found a Pong game in one of the base modules. I couldn’t figure out how to move the bat.
The idea that memories from devices and robots came out as slideshow images was a cute idea. I liked it. But not so much the transparency of the images. There was one point where the device was so dark, I had to back off in order to see what the slides were showing.
I’m so tired of the trope of getting exhausted after sprinting for a while. Just let me sprint forever.
I got the ending where Rohytra nuked the flies from the bridge in the enormous Kondor rocket. As I always guessed, it didn’t kill the flies. Instead they regrouped and attacked the rocket, blasting through the windows like a typhoon. The end.
Pros
- The barren planet looks great and successfully creates the atmosphere needed by the story.
- Yasna talks to her commander all the time, and the dialog is both well voice acted and written.
- You’re not always alone, and you even get to drive and fly vehicles at times.
- You have devices such as a telemeter and a tracker to help you find your astronaut mates.
- Jumping and crawling is not tricky at all. No old school first person jumping here.
- Several action set pieces makes you almost forget this is in essence a walking simulator.
Cons
- Yasna and Novik sometimes talk too much and you can get impatient for them to stop.
- Sprinting is of the kind where the protagonist gets tired and has to take a break.
- Some of the simple button fiddling on devices may have you longing for actual puzzles.
- Checkpoints can be far apart, having you to redo several minutes when restarting the game.