Innate curiosity

The Invincible is one of those titles that bombards you with stories. We are in the shoes of Yasna, an astrobiologist who embarks on a space race journey with her team. In this situation, we end up losing our crew in the middle of an unknown planet called Regis III, and it is from that point that the game begins.

Therefore, our first objective is to find the lost crew and make the right choices while going through great dangers. The game is focused on the narrative and, therefore, makes us need to choose the direction of the story through dialogue.

In other words, we are lost on a planet we don't know, far from our friends and without direct communication with the team. With that, we basically talk to ourselves as we decide which way to go.

The work is well focused on scientific themes and exploration within the game. It allows you to see everything you want and learn from each point marked, and we can mark it or have already marked it previously, depending on what the character can recall in its memory.

Thus, Yasna finds herself lost and without remembering small details, but she still remembers the lessons she learned and some places she visited, which is of great help in our journey. This way the game is conducted, with a lot of story to tell and great paths to follow.



Remembering…

After we manage to get up and make small movements, our character begins to remember what happened, but it is difficult to remember why we are standing there. Yasna then walks slowly and passes several locations that bring back her memories.

So, our exploration begins, in a large area and with plenty of instructions. To begin, we use a logbook that the character carries in her backpack. She wrote down everything she found interesting and important for the future, here, in this case, in the very near future (because we will need the notes as soon as possible).

This way everything becomes a little easier. We can be free to explore, but always write everything down again in case we need it. And this is done automatically by the game, it is not the player who has the initiative to take the notebook and cross it out.



This was a factor that I noticed that happens frequently, which is the issue of many processes being automatic and few involving the player interacting with the game. To understand better: at one point in the narrative, I needed to use a metal detector and I was given the command. Later, when I thought about using it again, my character already took it in her hand without even me “telling her”.

This question, for me, was a little uncomfortable. This is because I like to have autonomy and think about what my next step will be, as if it were a difficulty to be faced right away, and in this title there don't seem to be many moments like that.

That said, the game doesn't let you make mistakes either. The controls are quite basic and I tried walking close to high places several times to try to fall, but it wasn't possible. The game guides you to the right place and to “collect” memories all the time.



So, I found that the controls are also very limited, which makes the experience a little less realistic as it is also an action game - and that, in truth, there isn't that much action on the part of the player.

One thing that I found really cool were the small quick time events, which occur through dialogue. The lines, when they appear on the screen, have a certain amount of time for you to think about the best answer and the choice, that is, you need to pay attention to what is being said (in English), the subtitles (in Portuguese) and the game, and still opt for the best dialogue.

And, in this way, the game takes shape. With dialogues, narratives, memories and lots of adventure. One of the points that I really liked was that there are several useful mechanisms and objects, which we can also use according to need (or curiosity), not just automatically.

It's the issue of the rangefinder (which works like a spyglass), which we can zoom in and increase and decrease the distance by moving the lens and, with that, we can see distant places and issue a report about it. The report is extremely important so that our navigation chief is aware of everything and helps us with the mission. That said, it is an extremely useful tool.



In the beginning, basically our role is to issue reports to be delivered to bosses later. Every different place, liquid, object or even weather we encounter, we write in our diary. Thus, we have recorded several important and interesting information that will be used in the future.

And that's exactly what I imagine astronaut missions to be like, which require a lot of records and reports of different types. It even creates a different, even tedious, atmosphere for those who don't understand the subject. There are many technical terms and long explanations about many things that we often cannot understand and do not hold our attention.

Eccentric

One point that I really liked about this title was that its setting is simply perfect. The game leaves you very immersed in the narrative because it invested a lot in audiovisual resources.

What I mean by this is that its soundtrack and background sounds give exactly the desired feeling. During gameplay, I felt very tense and attentive to what was happening at the moment, and I searched for answers almost automatically.

In addition to also exploring those environments a lot in search of understanding each part of that story that was still being told. As there are cutscenes in the game, it was inevitable that we would follow a certain path so that the scenes completed the narrative, which was being told through the character's memories.

But, while searching for these specific points, I enjoyed good music, with striking and strong melodies, and very well detailed scenes and objects, which is why I say that what caught my attention the most were these elements.

As a result, I really liked the drawing style and the theme chosen for the game. The colors also matched the proposal very well, and the tireless use of orange really shows this. For me, games with a sci-fi theme need to use orange, yellow, blue and black, which is how I imagine and see in many other works (such as films) what a planet unknown to us is like.



That said, the coloring and tone choices were exactly on point. Not too saturated (vivid), not too bright, but as they should be: present and opaque, to simulate the countless meteorological events that end up directly influencing the environment.

Taking into account that the game requires 8 GB of RAM, Intel Core i5-10400F processor and GTX 1660 graphics card as minimum requirements, I played on a PC with 16GB of RAM, Intel Core i5-9400F processor and GTX 1050 Ti graphics card , I didn't suffer any bugs or glitches, the game ran perfectly.

We thank 11 bit studios for providing us with the key for The Invincible for PC.

Translated and Reviewed by Luisa Rodrigues da Cunha