An indie studio created a game based on Stanislaw Lem's novel

Its a prequel to the novel actually. But I don't think the advertising makes that apparent enough.

Its a walking simulator for the most part. (For those that know what that means) Think of it as a journey you take part it. But there are a few choices you can make to change a bit of who dies, and a affect a slight change in the ending.

I enjoyed it thorougly. And felt it was a great representation of the retrofuturistic world the book presented, and stayed mostly in the style of that era.

I haven't played the game because my 11th-gen Intel Framework 13 isn't that fast for running newer games, but I love the story - here's an excerpt from one of my favorite scenes in the book, the battle between the Invincible's Cyclops and the dark cloud of nano-machines:

> In principle it was not used on the surface of a planet, and the truth was that the Invincible had never once mobilized its Cyclops. Situations that called for such an eventuality, even on a scale of the entire tonnage of the space base, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the jargon used on board, sending out the Cyclops for some task meant the same certainty as entrusting it to the Devil himself. No one had ever heard of any Cyclops failing.

> the black scrub on the slopes began to smoke and set off in waves toward the vehicle from Earth, coming on with such vehemence that in the first instant the Cyclops disappeared completely, concealed by what looked like a cape of tarry smoke flung from above. At once, however, a ragged flash lit up the entire breadth of the attacking cloud. This was not the Cyclops using its terrible weaponry, merely the cloud’s energy fields striking against the force field.

> Out of the corner of his eye, Rohan saw the commander open his mouth to ask the Chief Engineer standing next to him if the field would hold out—but the words didn’t come. He didn’t have time.

> The black whirlwind, the walls of the ravine, the bushes—all of it disappeared in a split second. It looked as if a volcano breathing fire had opened up in a fissure in the rock. A column of smoke and frothing lava, shattered rocks, and finally, immense white billows of steam that probably came from the boiling waters of the stream, soared a mile into the air to where the TV relay was hovering. The Cyclops had activated its antimatter cannon.

The game is superb. I was approaching it from a highly critical standpoint, between the choice of a new story in the same setting, and overall rather poor track of Lem adaptations to other media than books, which I felt either didn't try to be faithful, didn't have any budget, or both.

But the game won me over near instantly. Its pacing, presentation, and writing are top notch. Overall I feel that it's worth a try whether you know the original story or not. Knowing the book will spoil a lot of the, let's call them twists, very quickly, but will also provide interesting context for things shown before the protagonist finds things out on her own.

"The Invisible" was the first adult sci-fi book I read. I think I was in 2nd grade and had just learned how to read. Very early 80's.

I recall that my arts teacher told me about Lem in 4th grade when I was drawing some spaceship and I told her I already read some books by him. She didn't believe me until I told her details about the stories.

"The Invincible" was mind blowing at that age and set a pretty high standard for everything in that genre I read after.

I still think my dad left it laying on the living room table intentionally for me to find. He had almost everything Lem had written until then and was probably fed up with me reading the pulp kids/teen sci-fi that I was at the time.

As I grew up in Germany pretty much all of Lems works were readily available in German, which definitely helped.

Speaking of Lem adaptions: I was already doing computer graphics/VFX in my early 20's when I gave reading "Solaris" another try (it had been too long in the tooth for me in parts as a teen).

And I recall the visual description of the ocean at multiple scales (it's two pages or more) and though: that will take years for VFX tools to get to the stage where we can visualize that.

I'd say we've only been there since less than a decade.

Interesting. I read this book over the summer (and also discovered in the process that my library also has a collection of Lem in Polish too! Too bad I don’t know Polish). I suppose as long as they are focusing on an “atmospheric retelling” of the story, it doesn’t really matter that none of Lem’s stories ever end in human triumph. This one ends mostly in confusion and failure.

I also recently learned that there was a new English translation of Solaris. This version is much-hyped for being closer to the original, but as I read it, I am finding that I preferred the original translation (even though Lem himself reportedly did not like it). Anyway, huge Lem fan. Maybe an immersive game-like experience will better serve Lem’s visions. I was sorely disappointed in Soderbergh’s awful film version of Solaris. It just didn’t capture the terror of the story at all.

Lem is highly underrated for not being published in America during sci-fi’s heyday.

Looks really cool, but on a side note: is this self-promotion? There is a ?hn tag at the end of the link.

Amazing novel but this is neither a direct adaptation nor faithful to the novel's message and ideas. It's a modern walking simulator with a the most surface level veneer of what we now consider retro futurism but otherwise modern in its messaging. I'd rather they kept the core and modernised the paint.

It's incredible, maybe not for everyone though.

It is slow, it takes a few large story beats to really kick off the story. If you are in the right headspace, and are a patient player who is able to sink into the atmosphere, you will be gripped by the pacing.

The atmosphere is thick, dripping with retro-futurism, chilling environmental storytelling as well as thrilling story moments. The music will raise the hair on your skin.

If you don't want to dive in, I recommend giving the OST a listen on spotify/YouTube. It stands on it's own and is a pretty good representation of the feeling of the game.

This is nowhere near canon, but the Planet from "The Invincible" could easily be Fulgora from "Factorio: Space Age", some tenths of thousand years later. The oily oceans have decomposed into water and methane, the construction robots have evolved, the planets resources and ruins eaten up. The "rust layer" in the sediments was the planet-spanning factory. The engineer has its origin in the Lyra civilisation, which went extinct before the Invincible showed up.

Loved the game (superb voice acting by Daisy May), reading the book now. The studio also sells a sweet snow globe, highly recommend! https://store.11bitstudios.com/product/snow-globe-the-invinc...

For anyone who's read the book and played the game, a question. I have done neither but bought both last year for a rainy weekend's fun. Anybody have strong feelings about which I should start with?

If it is truly following Stanislaw Lem's ideas it will be quite frustrating, because no player will be able to succeed.

Since this has been reposted by the same poster several times, I don't feel bad about reposting my review calling it a "glorious failure": https://mssv.net/2023/12/26/the-invincible/

tl,dr: It looks incredible, like no other game you'll see today, and it grapples with deeply interesting themes – but it's extremely annoying to play and suffers from a serious lack of editing. There's just too much friction to become truly immersed. Still, other games can only wish their failures were this daring.

(Last time I made this comment it was immediately downvoted to oblivion. Shortly thereafter, the post itself disappeared from the HN front page, perhaps due to some kind of brigade-detection?)

This would be nice in VR.

Is this the same one you’ve already posted about 5 times before?