Most of my time in The Invincible went on walking through metallic structures on a planet called Regis III. The walk is the best thing in the game. It takes its time, letting the place turn wrong while you’re still deciding whether anything is wrong at all. I’d read Lem’s novel before I played, so I already knew what was down there. The game made the place strange anyway, which is the better trick and the reason I’d tell you to play it.
The adaptation keeps the discovery. Not the sequence of events, but arriving somewhere that doesn’t answer to you, learning by degrees how little your equipment counts for. You walk into that rather than have a character explain it. Knowing the answer in advance should have spoiled it. It came close.
It isn’t a retelling, though. I hadn’t expected that to matter so much. The novel’s Rohan and the game’s Yasna aren’t the same person doing the same things. The events around them diverge early, the game working its way to endings of its own. So you don’t get the pleasure of a faithful adaptation, where you know the story already and came for the telling. Both versions are built on the same discovery.
Whichever reaches you first gets it whole. The other arrives with its strangeness already used. I came to the game second, so the game paid. Had I played first, the novel would have paid instead. No order saves both. The choice was never about sequence. You’re picking which one you want at full strength.
The walk does go on. Somewhere in the middle of those structures the tension stops building and just sits there. The novel got more out of the same material. The drag is real, though it ruins nothing. But the atmosphere kept accumulating and left me wanting more than it gave.
I can’t separate that from the order I took them in. The novel came first, so it had a hold the game was never going to get twice. I don’t know how much of the game’s slack is the game and how much is me already knowing what was coming. I played it second. That’s the only version of it I can tell you about.