POLES APART
We’re given various options to press this man for information or else stay quiet, out of fear of provoking violence. Meanwhile, we’re also in radio contact with astrogator Novik, piloting the Dragonfly up in orbit – a fact we’re trying to conceal from the stranger. This leads to a kind of ‘blink once for yes’-style guessing game, where prompts allow us to grunt at the right moment to answer Novik’s questions. It’s entirely possible to mess this up, at which point the game moves swiftly along, your opportunity to pass along intel missed. At least some of these choices will have consequences, we’re told, eventually leading the game towards one of multiple possible endings.
The astronaut’s robot companion – an arctan, with broad paddle feet to walk on the sand and a single glowing eye set in a head halfway retracted into its body like that of a shy tortoise – pulls back a curtain and, with Novik’s voice stuttering to nothing as the rocks above block the signal, we’re officially behind enemy lines. Which is not as fearsome as it initially seems: the stranger’s camp consists of a green monitor and old-fashioned radio positioned on some upturned boxes, and not much else.
We meet two of his comrades, who the stranger greets on arrival like a pet owner returning from the shops. They’re tethered to the cavern’s walls (for their own safety, he assures them) and we soon see why. These are grown men, their hair and beards long, but they behave like infants, relying on this man to feed them. As he guides the spoon towards one’s mouth, he turns his head away in the timehonoured tradition of fussy toddlers at dinnertime; meanwhile the other, untethered, crawls up on hands and knees to inspect our face. This is a common fate on Regis, it seems, one that has already befallen two of the Dragonfly’s crew. It’s the first of many mysteries this planet has to offer.
As the stranger chats idly to his crewmates, we’re able to catch up on the situation. Our captor’s been here for 26 days now; the other members of his crew are all missing, dead or left in this incapacitated state. He is all that remains of a ship which seemed to represent the pinnacle of human scientific achievement, equipped with antimatter cannons and protective forcefields – none of which provided sufficient protection on a planet that seems, at least in any conventional sense, to be uninhabited. “It must have been a victim of something really powerful,” Markuszewski offers. “We are just starting to understand: what can it be?”
The other half of our preview session offers a chance to investigate this threat for ourselves. In a sequence taken from earlier in the game’s story, Yasna is following in the tracks of an expedition from the Condor. Behind the wheel of one of those bright yellow rovers, we pull up to the scene, finding the first vehicle half crushed by a rockslide. Disembarking, we call out each sight by pointing the cursor in their direction and pulling a trigger, and Yasna reports it back to Novik.
These calls bring to mind another game, one that might at first seem an unlikely comparison for a sciencefiction thriller. But when we ask Markuszewski about Starward’s inspirations, Polish literature aside, it’s the first word out of his mouth: Firewatch. Once we notice it, the model is clear. The map held in Yasna’s hands, with notes scribbled on in pencil. The constant presence of a helmet-mounted mic in the bottomleft of the screen. Even our surroundings are lit by a reddish sun reminiscent of the Wyoming wilderness, the landscape itself not too dissimilar to the desert temples and sand dunes of Campo Santo’s apparently abandoned followup, In The Valley Of Gods. Among other things, The Invincible is a kind of expanded walking simulator, picking up the torch that studio seems to have dropped since being assimilated into Valve.
Polish game development has burgeoned in recent years. As a 20-year industry veteran, how does Markuszewski feel to be part of it? “If I think about 2005 [and today], it’s two different worlds,” he says. “The most significant impact, still, is CD Projekt Red and Witcher. Those guys showed that a local company can hit the top world-class development. So it is a big inspiration, as a proof of what can be done with determination, ambition and a focus on quality.” CD Projekt – where Markuszewski worked as producer – enabled a new wave of studios to rise up, and doubtless more will follow in the future.
WHEN WE ASK MARKUSZEWSKI ABOUT STARWARD’S
INSPIRATIONS, POLISH LITERATURE ASIDE, IT’S THE
FIRST WORD OUT OF HIS MOUTH: FIREWATCH
Picking an adaptation as a debut project just seemed like good sense, Markuszewski tells us: “Opening an ambitious studio like this, it has so many challenges that it needs a very good foundation.” Still, book adaptations remain relatively rare in videogames – the most obvious comparison being what Markuszewski’s former employers have done with Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books. That wasn’t a direct influence, he says, though he likes the idea of boosting Lem’s profile outside of Poland the way CD Projekt has done for Sapkowski. It’s also a helpful reference point when it comes to attracting investors, he admits: “Before
if I said, ‘I have a book and I want to make a game of it’, I might have problems gathering money to do it. So it’s helpful that somebody has done this pioneering process for us.”
“WE DID A LOT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH BECAUSE
ALL OF THAT EQUIPMENT REFERS TO SOME EXISTING
PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY FROM THE PRE-DIGITAL ERA”
NOVEL IDEAS
We follow a gouge in the ravine wall to reach Yasna’s first major discovery: a pair of those giant crustacean-like machines. These are two of the Condor’s ‘antimats’ – walking antimatter cannons whose beams are able to punch through any material. One of them is simply deactivated, its shining chrome surface now weathered by time and exposure, while the other has been reduced to a crumpled heap of chrome, with a deep scar ploughed through its domed head.
Before we can fully take in this sight, though, we’re alerted by the sudden chirruping of Yasna’s tracker. It leads us to two human bodies, half buried in the sand, but we’re too busy delighting in the analogue design of this device – a walkie-talkie-shaped thing with LEDs studded into its surface in concentric circles – to worry too much. It’s indicative of The Invincible’s approach to technology: this is the future as it was seen from the time Lem was writing. Starward has drawn on inspirations from contemporary science-fiction artists such as Chris Foss, but also upon the real-life work of Galina Balashova, whose designs helped define the Soviet space programme.
“We did a lot of historical research, because all of that equipment refers to some existing piece of technology – just old, from the pre-digital era,” Markuszewski says. “So we needed to learn how they work, not just take some shortcut.” He’s referring to the kind of fantastical science fiction that takes that old saw about sufficiently advanced technology as an opportunity to handwave away any need for explanations – in opposition to Lem, who dedicated pages of the novel to explaining his hypothetical science. “Here you have this very physical object where you can see what’s happening – it’s much more visible,” Markuszewski says. “So it’s harder to fake something, to do this, like, magic.”
We can’t speak to the soundness of Starward’s engineering, but it certainly looks convincing as we yank open a
panel on the underside of the antimat and fiddle with chunky dials and buttons to retrieve its recordings. A slot produces a thick stack of printouts in a way that recalls the punched cards used in early computing.
On closer inspection, though, these are more like photographic negatives arranged into a slideshow. Imagine the View-Master-style reels found within Psychonauts’ Memory Vaults, embodied in 3D space. Each slide features a delicate ink sketch by Ostrycharz, presented on a transparent sheet and coloured in a sepia wash that blends beautifully with the sandy backdrop. This proves to have a practical use, as we hold up one of the slides against our surroundings to locate a hole bored in the rock.
In sequence, the slides tell a story, like the panels of a wordless comic. A group of astronauts heads inside this hole. Their robotic assistants collect samples from within, then load the containers onto the convoy vehicles we found crashed. One man, looking disturbed, points at some sight beyond the frame. Whatever it is, it causes the astronauts to flee the hole. Our antimat watches on impassively as the other cannon fires in the direction of this unseen threat. Then, as we flip to the next slide: fuzzy blackness, like a negative that hasn’t been developed properly. We hold it to the sky – the light passing through offers nothing more than a better look at the indistinct haze.
Despite the bright sunshine, a chill runs through us, helped along by the music, which sounds as though it has been gradually slipping out of tune. It’s at moments like this that Starward’s other videogame inspiration begins to make itself known, one that was previously tucked away behind the game’s more Firewatch-like elements – Alien: Isolation. “The game is completely different,” Markuszewski admits, but the team looked to Creative Assembly’s survival horror in several ways: “building tension, with a threat, a danger that is not [always] visible and just that thick atmosphere”.
There’s a push and pull between these two disparate influences, and one that isn’t without occasional tensions. The audiovisual presentation of Regis does such a good job of showing that we wish the game did less telling. The characters comment on proceedings with a persistence that recalls Aloy’s most recent adventure, something that’s not helped by the occasional bit of awkward second-language phrasing or stiff line-reading from Yasna’s voice actor in particular, although this is something Starward informs us it’s aware of and is working on.
If we don’t need Yasna and Novik’s help to understand the images, though, we do appreciate their input on the tangle of alphanumeric data presented on the left of each slide. This proves vital, as they point out the number of enemy targets alongside the image of darkness, jumping from zero to a maxed-out 9,999. This is just the beginning of the antimat going haywire, as the readouts show a shift in its programming, changing from ‘escort crew’ to ‘eliminate’.
First its beam is turned onto the other antimat – which at least explains that scar we noted earlier. The remaining images provide a number of chances to see exactly what an antimatter cannon does when applied to the human body, before one final slide shows Yasna’s own face peering into the camera.
After a long, tense beat of silence… nothing happens. As if to make sure we can’t get too comfortable, the dialogue announces that it’s now time to head inside the hole. You know, the one where everything started going wrong – and as we get closer, we begin to hear an eerily regular thumping sound from within, getting louder and louder as we head down the dark tunnel. Yasna is feeling the pressure too, it seems; she complains of headaches and her vision begins to swim, another
THE REMAINING IMAGES PROVIDE A NUMBER OF CHANCES TO SEE EXACTLY WHAT AN ANTIMATTER CANNON DOES WHEN APPLIED TO THE HUMAN BODY