This is the game. You pick a starting team, you start making tough calls from the very first mission, your team evolves into a new configuration with its own strange synergies and terrible failings, you lead them to heroic success or equally-heroic failure over about six hours, you unlock a new starting configuration and you go again. One part roguelike, one part persistent strategy game, it’s an innovative combination and it works gloriously.
Anything else? Oh, yes. It looks and sounds absolutely charming. The hacking interface in particular deserves a mention. Spacebar toggles the world into wireframes, swaps the soundtrack out for a half-dozen synthesizers and pulls the camera back *ever so slightly*, with any devices you can hack displayed in cherry red. What could have been a cluttered interface instead becomes you playing two games in parallel, delighting each time you swap between them.
Everything’s this sweet. The voice acting, writing, music and art design is all held to the same high standard. You end up looking forward to everything. From starting a mission with no idea of what surrounds you, to discovering the reward at the end, to escaping via the exit teleporter, to hearing the chatter between your team on the world map. It’s all satisfying, surprising, colourful and utterly devoid of friction, letting you lose yourself in the puzzle, yes, but also the evocative imagery the game thrills in. Your agents plotting daring heists, working like a well-oiled machine to rob a vault, and leaving with as much high-tech equipment as they can stagger under.
Or the other side of the coin – your plans coming crashing down around you and your agents abandoning one another, each sprinting around the level, heedless of cameras and sound bugs and just looking for a way out, before one comes face to faceplate with a six foot tall, weaponised security drone.
What then? Time stops. You exist in that heartbeat. You reflect on the greed and stupidity that brought you to this moment as you desperately pan the camera around the map. There has to be a way out. This can’t be the end.
Maybe it is, and you have to click the button that sees Nika gunned down. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe on the other side of the map, Internationale can siphon enough power from the terminal she’s hiding behind to give you control of that robot, for just one turn. One turn for you to turn this whole situation around. But that’s for you to find out.
You should buy Invisible, Inc. because, like I said, I think it’s the best turn-based strategy game to come out in years. But you should love it because it’s a creative endeavour that offers such rich moments. Just don’t let this sneaking masterpiece slip you by.
