Invisible Inc — Turn Based Tension
So, I haven’t done the writing about games thing for a while since our brief experiment with “actually having a website and writing things about games” fell over. But I have recently been playing Invisible Inc again, so I wanted to write about Invisible Inc, so here we are.
You should play Invisible Inc.
The thing about Invisible Inc is that, for what is effectively a turn based tactics game or maybe even puzzle game, it is extraordinarily kinetic. The entire game feels like it takes place *in the moment*, every decision, no matter how well thought out, no matter how long you’ve spent staring at the screen before clicking to commit to your chosen course of action, feels like it has been taken in the split-second, where it absolutely had to be taken, and where the consequence of that split-second decision can be enormous. You have all the time in the world to decide what you want your characters to do and yet it always feels like their lives hang in the balance, depending on your ability to make the right call at the right time. This is a tremendous achievement in terms of game design and Klei Entertainment deserve immense credit for the results.
Invisible Inc is a turn based strategy game, in which you control a team of usually two, but occasionally more, highly trained and extremely competent espionage agents, carrying out a hit and run campaign against far superior forces in order to prepare for one final, essential mission. This largely boils down to breaking into various facilities around the world in order to acquire funds, technology and equipment. These agents are then assisted by an AI, which allows you to hack into machines on the level, disabling alarms, taking over security cameras, shutting down security measure, opening safes, that sort of thing.
As a result the missions in Invisible Inc feel like the best bits of those heist movies or spy movies you’ve seen. The whole game is Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling in Mission Impossible….2? How many of those have there been now? Six? That film reference is 18 years old? No I’m not old, *you’re old*. Ahem, sorry.
Ok, let’s try again. The whole game is the finale of Ocean’s Eleven, where the….what? 2001? For f….
The point is the game conveys an incredible level of urgency in a genre which usually lends itself to slow, quiet contemplation. It manages to make all your decision making feel tense and pressurised, which in turn lends itself to mistakes, and those mistakes will be punished, severely, as the agents’ lives are in your hands, this is not a game where the good guys can take a bullet and, most of the time, you won’t be able to fire back either. It’s this creation of urgency and tension, while simultaneously allowing you-the-player the time to consider the best course of action that marks the game out as an absolute work of genius.
I’ll give you an example. My team’s hacker, Cuban revolutionary hero Maria “Internationale” Valdes, is in the process of downloading some extremely sensitive files from a computer terminal in the headquarters of a major corporation — an evil corporation, obviously, it’s all a bit cyberpunk — when a security guard ambles into the room. Internationale is immediately spotted and the guard draws his gun. The other member of the team, an Irish thief known only as “Banks”, is too far away, unable to help directly. It’s our only chance though, Banks sprints headlong through the corporate HQ toward the armed man, the sound of her footsteps causes the guard to turn, buying Internationale enough time to slip out of a side door with the files, and like that, we’re gone.
Now, this will have taken a couple of turns in the game, and perhaps 5 or 10 minutes of planning to execute from the moment the guard drew his weapon, but it feels incredibly quick and incredibly stressful and I need to step away for a moment, wipe the sweat from my brow, and figure out how the hell we’re going to get out of this building now the guards know we’re in here.
What a game.
The second thing Invisible Inc does that sets it apart from other stealth based games, is steadily ratchet up the tension every single turn. There is an alarm, it’s been triggered when your agents first breached security, and it is ticking up with each turn. Every five turns a new threat is introduced to the level, be that extra guards, more security on systems you need to hack, new cameras being activated or similar. This means that as well as playing against the puzzle posed by the level, you are also playing against your tendency to be a completionist and your own innate greed.
See, when you start the level, you don’t know where the exit is, you need to find it. And there’s not just one objective, there’s a main objective of course, but also there’s all sorts of other exciting things to find and liberate from corporate hands. But that alarm is ticking up every turn, so you’re left with another layer of decision making. We’ve got the files we came for, we’ve found the exit, but also there’s a really fancy looking safe over there and wouldn’t it be good if we found out what was in it? It could be money. A lot of money. Or guns. Or an experimental cloaking device. Imagine how useful an experimental cloaking device could be? So, do you go for it, or play it safe, and if going for it gets you killed then, well, that was your fault.
That’s the other thing. There’s no dice rolls, no random number generation within the level. The UI is so clean and as a result the outcome of every click of the mouse is clearly indicated to you ahead of time, so when you make a mistake — and you will make a mistake — people are going to die and it will be game over and it will be your fault.
Seriously, play this game.
Invisible Inc is, of course, available on Steam and however much it currently costs is too cheap.
