Game Review: Invisible Inc

All for the want of a story...

Invisible Inc is a gameplay mechanic driven roguelike that holds a huge amount of promise, if only the game didn't feel like it was made entirely by the gameplay mechanics and graphics teams, two areas where the game shines. This is a game that was designed to be replayed a lot, and to remain challenging each time. Unfortunately, the weak story deprives the player of a lot of motivation to invest in that content. Let me elaborate:

The Pledge: A stealth driven random generated futuristic cyberpunk roguelike where confronting guards head-on is infeasible, and the objective is to build the best team you can in 72 hours. Excellent cutscene introduction sets expectations high for great visuals and great plot points. This game had one of the very best Pledges, setting my expectations really high given the slick execution of the first two hours

The Turn: Tense game of Cat and Mouse between your operatives and the guards, with each action decidedly a calculated risk and the ever increasing security timer forcing an aggressive play style. Difficult to get new items, and soon PWR (Mana) is a scarce resource to be rationed. New guard types (thankfully no dogs), viruses, and new goodies to buy keep gameplay moderately interesting but lack of any story content during missions / barely any between missions is a gigantically big missed opportunity. Feels more like an elaborate puzzle than an actual strategy game due to the limited patrol areas of guards, and the extremely strange rule of sitting on top of guards prevents them from waking up, and taking them out comes with strong penalties. Strategic decisions are related to which missions to pursue (each provides different boosts dependent on the type of mission), and where to invest your limited cash reserves (augmentations / gadgets / skill upgrades).

The Prestige: Where it all falls apart. Only one ending, though the map and specific enemies on the level are randomized. Due to lack of context due to lack of meaningful story content, ending feels both abrupt and all too sudden, with no fair visibility given on what will happen next in the series (beyond the very obvious). This was the point where I started questioning my purchase

The Aftermath: Where the bulk of content is held, new agents, alternate agents (different abilities), and new abilties for your AI. Unfortunately, due to a lack of new story it came across as less appealing than it probably is, and I doubt I'll be investing much time in it in the future. 

For specific demographics:
Price sensitive: If you enjoy the Aftermath, it's worth the price, otherwise you're out of luck
Genre sensitive: Lots of throwaway cyberpunk joy, but never synthesized in any way that makes sense. Tons of tidbits but no overarching narrative that puts the pieces into context, major letdown
Strategy gamers: Frankly the game feels a lot like a puzzle but does have meaningful strategic choices, so it's ok
Diversity seekers: Good premise, decent gameplay, fair variety in Aftermath. If you don't mind a weak story, go for it
Those with older systems: Game worked and ran beautifully and smoothly on my humble laptop, should run well anywhere
Art lovers: This and Transistor are a treat to the eyes

Final verdict: Great potential, if only it had invested more in story, this version feels incomplete. If you like mechanic driven games or particularly Turn Based games, go for it, it's a great product. For others, check out videos first and then take a call. 


Game: Invisible Inc.
Launch Date: 12th May, 2015
Time for One Game: 4.5 Hours
Time Reviewed: 5 Hours
Get it on: Steam
Based Price: $20

Disclosure: X-COM, which this is inspire from is one of my all time favorites, along with Klei's Mark of the Ninja. Klei Entertainment is one of the good indies making games that are innovative and fun, and I respect that, however I really wish this game could have been better...

For more on the Pledge/Turn/Prestige/Aftermath Review structure, check out: http://criticalh1t.blogspot.in/2015/06/the-prestige-and-meaningful-game-reviews.html

The Prestige, and meaningful game reviews

A game that can be finished in one hour (80 Days) can be a far better experience than one that lasts for a month (Clash of Anything, Really), an indie game with pixel based graphics (FTL!) may be a far more engaging and innovative experience than the latest AAA with high resolution art bursting out of the gills (Too many to list), and in this vein there are many more meaningless weasel metrics being paraded such as number of units or resolution (1080 vs 720!) in game reviews today, which fail miserably at capturing the essence of the game. This essence should reflect the sum of a game's parts, distinct from the individual parts themselves. Focusing on just one element without looking at the overall experience created by the interplay of content is doing a great disservice to the nature of games, designed as a means of spending your time in the best possible way. Hence I propose the following four phase structure of a game as the template for meaningful game reviews that do not lose the forest for the trees.

In my experience, there are four phases of experiencing a game, which I will try and roughly equate to the steps of a magic trick outlined in Christopher Nolan’s mental masterpiece, the Prestige. These are the Pledge, the Turn, The Prestige, and my own addition: The Aftermath. We’ll go into detail over these below, but it is worth mentioning that no one part is more important than the others on its own. Each plays a part towards the overall experience, much in the same way the elements of a four-course meal synthesize into a worthy culinary experience, or fail trying. Also like a four course meal, a game with bad starters and a dull main course may still be redeemed by an excellent desert at the end, but in that case there is always the risk of the player losing interest before ever reaching the exquisite desert. For the stages themselves:

The Pledge is the promise made at the beginning of the game, between the game and the gamer, laying down the essence of experience to come. What’s the game about? What’s the theme and the setting? Who are you? Your role? What kind of challenges lie ahead? What’s the objective? The Pledge lays down the framework of what the gamer should expect, the skeleton of the game’s structure. In business lingo, this would be the on-boarding.

In most cases, the Pledge will not end with the end of the formal tutorial, but with the player having a mental picture, an imprint of sorts, of what lies ahead. Where Assassin’s Creed 4 drags this on-boarding out over nearly laborious ten hours, the lighter mobile delight 80 Days makes itself clear in a much smoother twenty minutes. Effectively, the Pledge becomes the litmus test by which a player decides whether or not to invest their time into playing the whole game. In MOBAs like DOTA the pledge has been meticulously crafted to give a new player both a fair view of the game, and to incentivise them to play on with item gifts for completing the tutorial.

Just so we’re clear, I’ll share two examples of pledges - Spec Ops: The Line pledges to be a gritty 3^rd Person cover based military shooter set in a disaster struck Middle East, where finding out the cause of the current situation is the game’s purpose. In Terraria, the game’s pledge is to be a fantasy themed 2D platformer where the onus is on the player to figure out what to do next, and the eventual goal is to thrive off the randomly generated environment and defeat the creatures that attack you.  

On the PC, with the new Steam Two Hour Gameplay refund policy in effect, I expect to see a lot of improvement in the quality of this segment of the game and unfortunately also a lot of window dressing in the first two hours of many new games.

The Turn is where the ordinary concepts outlined in the pledge come together to create something truly extraordinary. The Turn is where the bulk of gameplay happens, it’s the stage in which you figure out how you want to aim for victory and set out doing that, interacting with the games systems and other players as you do it. Here the game matures and fleshes out its systems, introducing new and novel characters, places, items, challenges, and corresponding rewards along the way.

In Pokemon, this is the time you spend travelling from Gym to Gym, building your team, evolving your characters, and making a lot of memories on the way (A Safari! A Boat! Fossils!). In Sid Meier’s Civilization series, this is where you grow your nation, expanding your cities, researching technology, and waging war or promoting culture on the road to victory.

The systems outlined in the Pledge also get upgraded, twisted and subverted during the Turn. A great example of a twist is the Fanatic’s Tower in Final Fantasy VI. Up till the Tower, the game gives you the opportunity to attack enemies with physical attacks, magic, or through abilities. In the Fanatic’s tower, you cannot select physical attacks from the menu, and are expected to use the other two methods to damage your enemies. The catch? The enemies in the Tower are highly resistant to magic damage, and abilities take time to use. This twist in combat structure inspires the player to question the approach that got them this far and change their team and strategy to adjust. In my own play-through, this shakeup in the fundamental pledge made me stop and relook at every system, and how to face the new challenge. I distinctly remember my train of thought at that stage - Are there any resistance bypassing spells I can use? (Yes, Ultima) Is there a way to use physical attacks without selecting them from the menu? (Yes, for one character through specific items, also through a spell) Is there a store in the tower? (No) Do I have enough Mana Potions to reach the top of the Tower in one go? (No, so I went to a store and stocked up) Was there any way to bypass the regular enemies entirely on the way to the top? (Yes, but that approach would have deprived me of both the larger challenge and the experience points on the whole). Going through the tower with my strategy and defeating the Boss at the top was an extremely satisfying victory, derived from using the knowledge I already had with me, but through relooking at what I knew in new and novel ways. This twist added greatly to both the depth of the gameplay and the lasting experience of the game itself.

The Turn is where the game designer has free reign to challenge the player, to express his creativity, and to make the ordinary extraordinary, bit by bit. The actions made during the Turn build up towards the second last phase of the experience, The Prestige.

The Prestige is where everything that has been built towards comes to a crescendo. It is the final chapter in the story, where plot threads align, and decisions make their pay off. In Mass Effect 2, this was the Assault on the Collector Ship, where the time you had invested in building your crew and your ship either paid off (no casualties, a clean mission), or failed miserably (with the option of no survivors, not even the player character himself/herself). All the effort put in the earlier phases, the time spent learning the moves, the time invested into learning the lore, and the mastery of the underlying systems and decisions are challenged more than ever before in the Pledge.

Players tend the remember the Prestige very strongly when recalling the game, as it was the convergence of their experience and choices, and as such developers do well to focus on the quality of this segment. Many games go all out at this point with extremely challenging missions and/or bosses, defeating which gives the player a mental jolt of satisfaction in having become better players at the game than they were when they began the journey. At the same time, a carnival ending isn’t required everywhere to still be poignant and memorable, Gone Home’s final revelation brought together all the pieces of the story and explained why the titular home is empty and was none the less for it. Achieving the Prestige is the goal set up in the Pledge, and when done well, it is a powerful catharsis of elements in the minds of the player. 

When players meet and talk games, they may or may not share their experience of the Pledge or the Turn, but they readily share how a game’s Prestige impacted them (I survived the Mass Effect 2 Collector mission with my entire team alive, Woohoo!). However, the Prestige itself is not always the concluding experience of a game.

The Aftermath. With the commitments made during the Pledge either resolved or intentionally left open, the Aftermath is what happens after the main story has concluded. 

The Aftermath can happen in a number of ways – 

1. Limit the player to the game as it was just before the final chapter or a require the player start a new game from the start
2. Allow the player to replay the game from the start but with accrued benefits (including the intangible benefit of experience of what will happen in the game) from completing the first play through (the New Game + option)
3. Let the player continue the game where he left off, though by this point they’ll usually be strong enough that challenges laid out during the Turn will tend to be far less difficult
4. Open up and reveal new content that was hidden till now.

An example of each of the types of Aftermath is as follows: 

1. Mario and Luigi: Superstars Saga stops after you’ve defeated the final boss, the only way to continue is to replay the game from either the final battle or the very start again. This option does reduce the scope for replayability, as each playthrough will be more or less the same as the last in a linear game. 
2. Fire Emblem, on the other hand, gives new save files a handful of powerful and handy weapons for completing an existing savefile, which allow the player to play the core game faster or more enjoyably, or in some cases, in a different manner entirely. 
3. In GTA V, the Aftermath of the final heist is a strange endgame driven by completing side quests, collecting meta-game achievements and for a large part trying to figure out that entire UFO business.  
4. An example of the fourth kind, in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, after beating the main story, an entire new character with new gameplay mechanics and a new boss were unlocked, which added an extra layer of narrative and depth to the game.

Among genres, Roguelikes are heavily dependent on the Aftermath to deliver the full range of their experience, as continual upgrades across one play provide bonuses to the next which enable the player to progress ahead and over time tease out the full content of the game.

What’s notable is that gameplay and the objectives in the Aftermath are often very different from the gameplay and experience during the Turn, as the raison d’etre of the game has changed, either because you already know the end to the story, or because you are playing more for diversity than for novelty. Linking back to Nolan’s Prestige, the Aftermath was what happened after we found out the identity of the man who had adopted the magician’s daughter.

To Summarize:

We can use the experiential stages of a game as a meaningful way to structure game reviews, one that doesn’t miss the forest for the trees and fixate over details that are not comparable. Comparing playing a game to the experience of witnessing a magic trick is one approach that can help provide a fair, overarching method to review games.

Part 1: Why do we need Gaming?

Understand a person, a people, or a species through how they spend their time - apart and together

The definitions of a game are legion, and I will not add another contender to that fight. Rather, I would prefer to focus on how the activity of gaming relates to how we spend our time, trace its origins and the journey that has led to the modern day video game industry, and where I see it going beyond. This is the first in a larger four part series dealing with the larger picture of gaming.

As for my credentials for this journey, I am a twenty-something gaming enthusiast with a diverse range of interests. I started gaming at the age of five and the hobby never lost its charm, evolving with me over time, across gaming platforms, countries, and even through college. While I would not be naive enough to call any one game the best, I highly recommend Civilization V, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and This War of Mine, among a myriad of other excellent options. Now, back to the topic at hand!

Since the time of humanity's hunter-gatherer days, mankind has been faced with a timeless question: What do I do with my time? In a hunter gatherer lifestyle, between searching for the next meal and ensuring the safety of the group there probably wasn't much worry over over sonnets, epic tales, or the meaning of life, everyone was probably busy enough trying to stay alive. As we laid down settlements, domesticated wildstock, divided work, developed moral codes to clarify right and wrong behavior, and invented technologies to ease our burden of work, we found ourselves with more and more free time and less and less productive work to do in it.

From this new found time and freedom, culture and all its memes were born. Language codified our communication and art translated our thoughts and expressions and inspired even more, and along the way, games came into being. At this early stage, games may have been important for their social utility. Through friendly competition with oneself or others, games would prove to be useful means to improve the capability of the group as a whole, and thus would be encouraged, or at the very least not unnaturally discouraged. Among many possible games, war games could help children practice in safe environments and grow into able fighters or generals, crafting games may have encouraged new and better designs, word games would have encouraged mental growth and development. Most games may have simply provided a fun way to spend time and help people connect with others in the community or explore and develop their own unique identity.

Games can play a powerful part in telling stories - those building blocks of society. Simple games like Cops and Robbers help children learn on their own that in a society - responsibility is rewarded and crime is not. In this way, games are vehicles for replication of beneficial memes while also establishing what is not wanted in a society, in a simple and fun way that kids can easily internalize. Given multiple games to play, different rules and rewards to understand, I'd say its safe to add that games help people learn how to learn, an essential feature in a growing civilization. Hence, games have social utility.

As is true for all culture, games also help define the boundaries of our society, by offering us choices and reflecting the implications of our decisions back at us. By offering us new concepts and helping us understand them and develop notions of their correctness, Games help bridge the gap between mankind's reach and its grasp. For a far-out example, Mass Effect introduced us to the genophage virus (something hopefully beyond our reach at this time) that selectively decimated the population of an alien race, and showed how the survivors had devolved into risk takers with little hope for their own future, and hence excellent mercenaries with little concern for their own survival. At the same time, the game series later also gave the option of undoing the lingering damage of the virus (with its own set of complications and outcomes), a choice I'm sure almost no one will ever have to make in real life. Yet, in giving us the choice the game helped us understand what we felt was right and wrong, and should there ever come to a vote over banning development of such research, the audience may have better context regarding the implications of their decision, through the experience of an interactive choice they were offered in a game. This choice, and seeing its implications either way (stopping or not stopping the virus) helps increase our grasp as a society, by using interactivity to understand our decisions, interactivity at a level almost no other form of media can offer - not books, not movies, not music.

I hope that through this primer, you are able to appreciate some of the reasons why gaming thrives due to its utility, but it would be unfair to say that another reason why it's become a rapidly growing industry in our times is simply because it's fun. Games will continue to evolve as messengers of ideas of experience, but a real beautiful part of it all is that games will continue to improve for the sake of  games, for the sake of us enjoying our time even more. Hence, through it all games add to society richness, through adding to the meaningfulness of the time we spend, both together and apart.