The Invincible

A beautiful, atmospheric and deep love letter to one of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time. Fits nicely with the novel's storyline, treats original material with respect and at the same time should be accessible to people who don't know Lem. For any hard sci-fi fan this is a must.

Its a rare example of good classic sci-fi story implemented in a form of a game. Very beautiful game with interesting story. It is basically a walking simulator, but it was not boring all that 7 hours, because something happends all the time and there are always something interesting or beautiful to watch. Game is very carefull about sound and visual details. Voice acting is marvelous. Character movement animation is complex and realistic. Very good work, masterpiece of its kind. The only bad thing about it is unreal engine common technical issues. Microstutters, low LOD distance on epic settings (objects/textures just popping up frequently). Rover bugs: you can stuck in it or it can just dissappear.

A lot of people are saying this is "no action" and "slow" but what they don't mention is that there are multiple instances where the game forces you to go forward if you actually try to stop and enjoy the scenery. And given it can force you to go forward in the middle of dialog, you're forced to choose between listening to the game or investigating everything... so it doesn't feel slow to me at all... it feels rushed quite often. This is compounded by the iron made save mode-- if the game forces you forward before you're ready-- you have to start over from the beginning to get back to what you missed. This kind of gameplay doesn't invite "replayability" for me, it makes me feel like one-and-done because I hate it when games take away my agency (my choices) to force decisions or actions on me. It's like the old style quicktime games where you didn't really control your character, you just pressed a key at certain points in the quicktime movie to move the story forward. It is, however, a story that slowly reveals its secrets, and it's definitely not an action game. Additionally, my nVidia 3090 (less than 2 year old machine) keeps spazzing out on this game (and only this game) and UE4 keeps crashing. Tells me they were unable to get a wide enough range of machines to do testing. Having to periodically reboot my computer because of what seems like a video memory leak is also quite frustrating.

The game has fulfilled my childhood dream of landing on an alien planet and exploring it with a scientific toolbox. Great story, beautiful views, and an immersive atmosphere.

The game made me want to read the novel it is based on, to give an idea of how great the game is. The OST itself is already amazing and I can not emphasise enough how much it further enhances the ambiance of the game throughout the gameplay.