INTERVIEW: Starward Industries on The Invincible, retro-futurism, and winning over Stanislaw Lem's estate
It takes only moments, but Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible worms unease and loneliness into his reader like a snake charmed out of a basket.
As the titular ship creaks and hisses in its hefty landing on Regis III, the choked desert planet where the crew found the last signal from their sister ship, it becomes immediately clear that something here is wrong - so wrong, in fact, that it could evade our understanding entirely.
It's this atmosphere that made Lem one of the leading voices in hard sci-fi alongside H. G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, and as you can imagine, it's one that took years to perfect. It won't stop some from trying - and even in spite of the difficulties standing in their way, there's a chance that Starward Industries have cracked it.
Their pretty fitting name aside, the team behind the video game adaptation of the classic novel, The Invincible, seem to know exactly how to turn the story into an interactive corker. Not only reflecting the ambience that Lem brought to life, but expanding it with new characters and a narrative that bends to its player's will. Talk about a tall order.
