The Invincible

Uhh I guess I'll put this as a positive review, after all I didn't hate it. A few caveats I think everyone looking to buy the game should know though. This game is indeed a glorified visual novel - it's a walking simulator, although to be fair there is a fair chunk of the game also spent driving, but largely a walking simulator with QTE dialogs and point and clicks. The game is also short, as you can see, I have just south of 8 hours of playtime at review time, I've just completed the game. So if you're partisan of the "1 buck = 1 hour" mindset, this game at the current 30 bucks price it is... not a good deal. Now technically you could get more hours out of this game by doing the branching paths. There [i]are[/i] branching paths, I thought they were all very minor because the game feels heavily rail-roaded but after looking at the achievements, it seems there are some pretty major branching paths, considering that for some of these achievements I don't have, I couldn't really think of a way I could have gotten them (players reaching any ending is at ~40% completion rate, some of the branching paths achievements are below 20 and 10%). The thing is, this game is highly un-replayable. I did say it's a glorified visual novel, but visual novels have competent skip functions. This game doesn't. I didn't even bother checking the last two branching paths, even though they're just conversational crossroads, because the checkpoint for them is a few minutes before the actual choice, and the "skip" button is so useless it might as well not be here. The conversations are slow, the cutscenes are slow, this is all fine the first time around, but extremely frustrating when trying to replay through it just to do one choice differently. Going by the achievements completion rate, I wasn't alone feeling that way, the majority of people who've played through do, so I do maintain my statement that the 8 hours of your first playthrough will be the only hours you'll get out of the game. Otherwise, the game tells its story fairly well, or rather the novel's story it's based on I guess (which I did not read nor know it existed beforehand). The environments are well designed, the game is looks good, the pacing has kept me interested all the way despite some unnecessary detours I've taken. The voice acting was kind of surprisingly good, although the conversations don't flow super naturally because characters refuse to interrupt each other so they all patiently wait their turn to speak. I did have some weird performance drops towards the middle of the game, some areas didn't have seamless loading at all, and then another area you backtrack to suddenly had bad performance when coming back to it. Despite running the game on high-end hardware that came out over a year after this game released?? kinda wack, but could have been a drivers issue. (though the loading zones definitely weren't a drivers issue and that's just the game). Anyway yeah, in conclusion, this is essentially a choose your own adventure novel, it's pretty interesting if you like the whole space setting (and it's pretty in general), and even more interesting if you're into the sort of retro-futuristic theme this has (I personally found it funny, seeing extremely advanced and primitive tech coexisting). Probably get it on sale, you're very unlikely to get more than ten hours out of it. Spoilery gripes: [spoiler] The story at the end was not very clear. I don't know if I missed something but literally everyone is dead, including everyone on the massive Alliance ship. The only people left alive in the Alliance are the one still sentient guy and the two essentially braindead people. Now it's pretty clear how everyone outside died, but everyone inside the ship...? At one point the player character makes a mention of a soap that's been half-eaten, implying they all died from starvation but... A lot of them are dead at their desks. The one alive guy had a seemingly infinite supply of cans that allowed him and the two other people to survive for over 400 days... clearly food supplies weren't that big of a problem. Also everything points to basically everyone being dead by the 26th, so it's definitely not supplies, but there's really nothing on the ship I could find that could even hint at the cause of death of the people on the ship. Also it was a bit annoying to have basically zero closure on the fate of our player character and getting hit by a credits roll. Basically anything could have happened to her, the credits roll before any conclusion could reasonably be made, not a big fan personally. Apparently this is "hard sci-fi", which supposedly is a genre of sci-fi with particular concern for scientific accuracy. There'd be a lot to nitpick about that, though in the original novel's defense, the 1960s had different understandings of science. My personal nitpick however is one that the game might have added, where one of the story beat is "oh no, the antimates can see through rocks, it has thermal imaging!" - that is not how thermal imaging works. It's [i]not[/i] a magic wallhack. [/spoiler]