The
spy movie, as the critic Brian Phillips pointed out a few years back, is at its
heart a fantasy about tourism. The spy skips all the fussy details of
travel—the discomfit, the bewilderment, the checked baggage restrictions—and
cuts right to the landmarks. They know all the roads intuitively; they’re
always fluent in the language. And if the spy of popular media is a fantasy
tourist, then the hacker is a virtual one: ducking through the back alleys of
cyberspace and turning the enemy’s tools against them with engineering
jiu-jitsu. They never miss a semicolon, or spend an hour refreshing Stack
Overflow.
For
the elite hacker-spies of Invisible, Inc., the act is so ironed out that it’s
almost frictionless. They beam straight into the inner sanctums of evil zaibatsus
like they came directly from the USS Enterprise. Another button press, and
they’re in the network wreaking havoc—assuming control of computer terminals,
surveillance cameras, and security drones. It all feels too effortless, at
first, as your agents trade off turns with the enemy guards, spending action
points to sneak around and override their systems. And then a momentary lapse
forces your hand and you kill a guard, which raises the alarm level, which
activates a new camera, which catches one of your characters dead to rights,
resulting in a miniature fox hunt that sends the alarm level even higher,
calling in heavier armored guards right next to your first character, who just
used their last bullet to kill that first guard, and you know what? Let’s just
hit the rewind button before this gets really out of hand.
Tour de force
It all starts when the Invisible
crew is raided by a global trust of militarized megacorps. The team is
scattered and shaken, but sets about clambering back into the fight with the
help of an omniscient artificial intelligence named Incognita. Incognita can
only function on backup power for 72 hours (or whatever time is pre-specified
in the exhaustively customizable options menu), so the agents go on a global
pillaging campaign, swiping as many corporate assets as they can, culminating
in a grand coup d’mainframe to reinstate their AI.
Enter, the spy-as-tourist.
Prospective missions crop up on a world map a-la XCOM: Enemy Unknown, offering
varied rewards in exchange for time against Incognita’s countdown. Do you shlep
all the way to eastern Russia for a difficult rescue mission, knowing it will
cost you twelve (scaled down) hours? Or do you plow through a string of
Mediterranean headquarters nearby that promise lightly guarded cash, weapon
caches, and powerful cybernetic implants? It sounds quaintly
romantic—abstracted as it is—the cyber spies globetrotting in their personal
jet, collecting gadgets.
But the spies are also hackers, and
hackers are fettered to the tools of their trade. Nobody hides their server
farms at the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. Consequently, a given level in
Invisible, Inc. looks about the same as any other: a warren of grid-based
conference rooms floating in a void, whether in Dublin or Dubai. The utilitarian
surroundings spoil some of the fantasy—imagine Neo never escaping The Matrix,
doomed to crouch-run between cubicles in perpetuity.
The modular design does serve an
end, however. Invisible, Inc.’s levels are procedurally generated, shuffling up
hallways, security, objectives, and extraction points so that no two
playthroughs are alike. The resulting unpredictability buoys the game’s
stealth, dissuading players from the rote memorization that’s always been
anathema to the genre. Take the previous hypothetical, with its exponentially
increasing comedy of disasters. It might have been avoided, had I saved a
single action point on my turn so my character could “peek” through a door
prior to throwing it open. Even spotted, there’s a saving chance to hop to an
immediately adjacent tile if it breaks line of sight. Or I might dive another
character towards a nearby terminal and siphon some power, which can be used to
turn a turret that will kill the guard. The gambit might pay off, but it also
might cause delays or unforeseen complications that cause me to miss out on a
chance at the enemy’s vault, or even lose two agents instead of one. Or maybe I
burn a precious “rewind” chance to reset the turn and try a new permutation?
Risk and reward are gauged, then a
door opens, a new variable walks in, and they have to be gauged anew. Many of
these variables are ushered in by the alarm system, which begins ticking up
from the first turn—even if the player remains undetected. After a few turns,
or an unstealthy blunder, the alarm ratchets up, introducing new layers of
security on enemy electronics and additional patrols, or even broadcasting the
location of the player’s agents. The effect’s a bit like having a downward
slope underfoot—you might be able to ignore it, but if you trip, you’re going
to roll for a while.
Rogues' gallery
On
anything but Beginner, Invisible, Inc. poses a steep challenge, and any given
run through the campaign can come crashing to a halt if things suddenly get out
of hand like that. When it happens, almost everything’s lost for good, in the
spirit of a roguelike (save files even wipe upon completion of the campaign).
But a few abilities remain, like the ones which govern Incognita’s hacking
abilities, and accumulated cash is banked towards new agents, many of whom
completely upend the manner of play. “Internationale,” for example, can
remotely activate the terminals that power up Incognita’s hacking interface,
even from behind walls. That’s the power problem solved, almost singlehandedly.
I find it hard to go without her.
They’re
a captivating rogues’ gallery, with the elegantly tapered musculature and
Easter Island heads that Klei favors, and wonderfully haughty, disinterested
British accents. Of Decker, a noir Blade Runner in a trenchcoat, Central, the M
of the group says, “The 20th century thing is an unfortunate affectation,”
affecting dame Judy Dench’s Bond matriarch in the process. It’s a pity that
they rarely speak, and outside of Central, Incognita, and a rogue merchant
named—ugh—”Monst3r,” they have little bearing on the terse plot that strings
the procedurally generated levels together. I’d have liked a chance to know
them better, beyond the rap sheets we’re given.
“Isn’t
that why we travel in the first place … how we’re able to know each other at
all?” Phillips poses, and, “to be a tourist is to be a spy with his cover
blown.” The great success of Invisible, Inc. is that it uses that prospect like
a lingering tension. A wall hides an inconvenient guard, a firewall hides a
malicious script, and suddenly the plans have changed, and it’s no longer
possible to be a dispassionate spy, memorizing patrol routes and waiting out
alarms. The team is strung out, the guards are closing in, the plane is
leaving. Who makes it?
Need To Know :
Reviewed
on: Windows
8, Intel i5 CPU, GeForce 660 Ti, 8 Gb RAM
Play it on: Dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT / ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Alternatively: XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Copy protection: Steam
Price: $20/£15
Release date: Out now
Publisher/Developer: Klei
Multiplayer: None
Link: invisibleincgame.com
Play it on: Dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT / ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Alternatively: XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Copy protection: Steam
Price: $20/£15
Release date: Out now
Publisher/Developer: Klei
Multiplayer: None
Link: invisibleincgame.com
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