The debut computer game from Starward Industries studio, based on the futuristic prose of Stanislaw Lem.
The plot of The Invincible is loosely related to Lem's novel of the same name – the creators took the world of the planet Regis III from the book, but wrote the plot themselves. During the game, the player takes on the role of astrobiologist Yasna, who wakes up on an alien planet. She has absolutely no recollection of how she came to be alone, when only moments earlier she was travelling peacefully through space in a hibernation cabin together with the rest of the crew with whom she was returning from an interstellar mission, and their next stop was home. In this single-player experience, the player must find the rest of the cosmonauts, exploring the beautiful scenery and facing the dangers lurking on an unknown alien planet.
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Starward Industries, photo: Leszek Zych / Polityka and private archive
The author of the plot is Starward Industries’ Magdalena Kucenty, a writer of fantasy literature who has published in Nowa Fantastyka and Fantom magazines, and in 2021 debuted with the novel Zodiacs: Genocracy. She has been nominated three times for the Janusz A. Zajdel Award, a Polish literary prize in the field of fantasy. The studio's art director is Wojciech Ostrycharz, an illustrator and animator, co-creator of Dying Light and the Call of Juarez series, among others. The visual and narrative layers of The Invincible are complemented by music by Brunon Lubas. Other important creators in the project were Maciej Dobrowolski, Olga Piech and Starward Industries founder and originator of The Invincible Marek Markuszewski, who has been involved in the games industry for 20 years as a producer.
The Kraców-based studio was founded in 2018 and employs 27 developers, which, as they jokingly say, gives them a total of 160 years of experience – because although The Invincible is the studio's debut, the creators themselves are not debutants. They have worked on the creation of well-known Polish games of the so-called ‘AAA’ category – releases with high budgets, high quality and good sales, such as Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3 and Dead Island. Starward Industries’ goal is to strive for the quality of these big games, but in smaller but equally appealing projects.
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The Invincible, produced by Starward Industries, photo: 11 bit studios
Work on the game began in 2018. The release of The Invincible, initially announced for 2021, finally took place on November 6, 2023. The publisher was Warsaw-based 11 Bit Studios, and the game is available on PC via Steam and on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. Spoken dialogue is in English, and the interface and subtitles are available in Polish, English, French, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Ukrainian.
Among the game's strengths are certainly its retrofuturistic, atompunk graphics. The gameplay is primarily about exploration and it is non-linear, with many cinematic scenes. Its guiding idea remains a quote by a character from Lem's novel: ‘Not everything and not everywhere is for us’. In the words of Olga Piech:
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As humanity, one day we became very full of ourselves in this technological and military rush. [...] Man comes and tries, with his human understanding of reality, to impose his power on a world that is not at all subservient to him.
