Video Game Review: ‘Invisible, Inc.’

Stealth is rare in video games, but “Invisible, Inc.” nails it.

Other games like “Thief” and “Metal Gear Solid” make the player relatively weak – you’re frequently outnumbered and outpowered, and as a result, rely on waiting for enemies to walk past the player’s hiding space. The “Batman: Arkham” games go for a more predatory style, but lose the fun of roguish vulnerability. The mechanics are the same in either case: The player is hidden from view or detected, and being detected usually means losing.

This is not so with Klei’s “Invisible, Inc.” The game was released in final form on May 12, after more than a year in an early access program, which allows users to buy incomplete games and fund their development. It’s for computers only, but a PS4 version is planned.

This long period of refinement made a difference – the game’s mechanics are easy to grasp but difficult to master.

Klei’s previous game, “Mark of the Ninja,” was an action platform, while “Invisible, Inc.” is a turn-based tactics game, which takes influence from an older genre of games called “Roguelike” – it’s easy to die, and the levels are randomly generated.

In “Invisible, Inc.” the titular organization’s headquarters is destroyed, and the player has three days to strike back against the corporations before the artificially intelligent hacker Incognita runs out of power.

The player controls a team of two operatives, plundering a series of randomly generated corporate offices for money and items, steadily increasing in level of difficulty. The campaign is short – six or seven missions, or about three hours in a full playthrough – but the steep increase in difficulty between each mission mean that every mission stays challenging, and nothing is trivial.

While spending a limited power resource to hack through cameras, turrets and safes, the player must reach the valuable corporate loot and find the exit. Guards kill in one shot, so sneaking is mandatory.

Most actions and character upgrade choices have a trade-off. Stunning a guard temporarily knocks him out, but alerts him when he wakes up. Killing a guard expends valuable ammunition and ticks the alarm counter up, making the level tougher. Every turn also increases this counter – five turns in, more cameras turn on, five turns after that, another guard is added, and so on.

That risk and reward decision between staying on a level longer to find more goodies, and getting out alive is what makes “Invisible, Inc.” compelling.

Like “XCOM: Enemy Unknown,” and older Roguelike dungeon crawlers, loss is an inevitability. If cornered without any rewinds, you lose the entire game and restart from the very beginning. There’s an option to restart the entire mission, but it’s only available on the lowest difficulty setting.

Losing progress, even a few mission’s worth, can be frustrating. But, almost always, it’s preventable. Most of the time, dying comes from taking a risk or sticking around in a mission too long.

The game’s visuals are heavily stylized and work for the benefit of gameplay. Swapping back and forth between the ’80s rounded architecture in these corporate towers and the Matrix-like hackable network overlay pushes the atmospheric espionage theme. The electric soundtrack adds to the urgency as the alert level goes up.

The plot is barely there beyond an introductory cutscene, and the characters have few lines between them. Since the game is based on playing from the beginning more than once, the banter quickly becomes repetitive.

The game relies on players choosing to increase the difficulty setting in a fresh playthrough. It also relies on the feeling of mastery over stealth, rather than rewarding the player by furthering the story.

The real stories in “Invisible, Inc.” are the ones found in play – the moments when the guards close in and there’s only one way out. When it works, it is tense and brilliant.

– Josh Greenberg