You are abandoned by The Invincible on a hostile alien planet, and it doesn’t let up.

Walking simulators, sometimes referred to as first-person exploration games, were quite popular at the time.

Some of the titles that allowed players to explore areas from a first-person viewpoint and find a story as they went were Gone Home, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. 

These games were essentially first-person shooters without firearms. The genre hasn’t been as active lately, for whatever reason. With The Invincible, a silent, lonely journey to a strange extraterrestrial world that never quite lets up, it’s back in a huge way.

The Invincible, a game created by Starward Industries, is based on the same-titled novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem and places you in the character of Yasna, an astrobiologist who is a member of a team investigating the bizarre world of Regis III. Things aren’t going very well at first. 

The game starts out as a sort of rescue mission, as Yasna has been split off from the other members of the crew. Yasna, her commanding officer in tow, starts exploring the supposedly desolate planet’s surface in an attempt to locate the other members of the crew.

Regis III is an odd location. It seems at first like a dead foreign world, with largely rocks and sand covering its surface. You will ultimately discover, though, that life does exist—just underwater. 

There’s no life at all, not even bacteria, on land for whatever reason. Naturally, Yasna’s mission to save her fellow crew members leads her to become involved in the planet’s secrets. 

I won’t give too much away, but when Yasna discovers expansive metallic buildings beneath the surface, it becomes evident that something far larger and unexpected is occurring.

The main way to discover this narrative is to stroll around. The planet is silent, but when Yasna investigates and uses the radio to communicate fresh information to her commanding officer, she speaks a lot. 

Additionally, when she explores new areas like subterranean caves and abandoned camps, she’ll stumble upon audio recordings and old notes that add to the plot.

There’s also a neat function on the Invincible where you can turn through security camera pictures like pages in a comic book.

All of it is fairly conventional fare for the genre, but The Invincible’s gameplay is particularly intriguing since it develops in tandem with the narrative.

In due course, you will acquire a few instruments, such as a scanner that can identify people in the vicinity and a device akin to an X-ray camera that allows you to see beneath or behind dense rock formations. 

This equipment will expand your capabilities to engage with the outside world. Later on, you receive a car to help with the extended walking distances over the desert.

In essence, as the game goes on, you get more and more things to accomplish. It’s essentially just going around at first, but by the end, it’s a completely new experience.

Simultaneously, the plot gradually moves from a straightforward rescue operation to a narrative of exploration and then to a potential confrontation.

I won’t give too much away, but the planet’s environment and history are interesting, and they make you, Yasna, make some tough choices. 

All of the strange and frightening things you come across—the corpses, the mentally disordered crew members, the enormous metallic buildings concealed beneath the surface—finally make logical, hard science fiction sense. 

Considering that you can’t truly fail or die in this sort of game, it becomes extremely stressful. Even the transition to action at the conclusion doesn’t seem out of place in any way.

Along with having a fantastic aesthetic, the Invincible has a retrofuturistic feel to it with lots of dials and knobs and tape recordings. It lends the experience a very tactile quality, whether you’re pulling out your tough scanner or turning on the power in an abandoned transport truck. 

It’s essentially the type of experience for those who see Loki simply to see the gadgets or who wish they could just walk about the ship in Alien: Isolation.

Additionally, the game doesn’t drag for too long. The Invincible guides you ahead in a way that seems both essential and natural, but it also gives you the freedom to make certain decisions and take some diversions. 

I saw everything in around six hours, which is fortunate for me since I don’t know how much longer I could hold out.