The Invincible review: missteps hold back this (space)walking sim

The android is unresponsive, standing frozen mid-step with one foot off the ground. I hold its metal head in my hands, tilting it this way and that as I stare into its cold red eye. It offers no resistance to my pushes and pulls, as though I was a hairdresser directing a patron’s head. Based on Stanisław Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, The Invincible’s Firewatch-like first-person adventure is intent on exploring how machines will come to shape humanity’s future. Over the course of its ten-hour story, where you step into the Soviet-styled space boots of biologist Yasna, you will take on her desperate search for the missing crew of her research ship, The Dragonfly, lost somewhere on the rocky, sandstorm-whipped world of Regis III.

Using a logbook filled with hand-drawn maps and scrawled notes, I’ve tracked Yasna’s crew to a makeshift game to the east of where they originally landed. Instead of humans, I find the lifeless robot. I want the android to give me answers, to tell me where my crew mates are, to explain what happened on Regis III, and why I can’t remember anything before I woke up in the desert with my possessions scattered around me.

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